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The Uniqueness of Man

By the same Author

ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST
ESSAYS IN POPULAR SCIENCE
BIRD-WATCHING AND BIRD BEHAVIOUR
AFRICA VIEW
WHAT DARE I THINK ?

A SCIENTIST AMONG THE SOVIETS
ANTS

h. huxley's diary of the voyage of

H.M.S. RATTLESNAKE

JULIAN HUXLEY

FRS MA DSc

THE

Uniqueness

OF MAN

London • 1943

READERS UNION / CHATTO & W 1 NDUS

This volume is produced in 1943 in entire conformity with the
War Economy Agreement of the Publishers' Association . It has
been machined in London by Lowe & Brydone Printers , Ltd,,
and bound by The Leighton- 8 traker Bookbinding Co. Ltd. It
is one of the books produced for sale to its members only by
Readers Union , Ltd., of 10-13 Bedford Street , London, and of
Letchzoorth. Particulars of RU are obtainable from either of
these addresses. “ The Uniqueness of Man ” was first published
in Great Britain in 1941 by Chatto & Windus , price 10 s. 6 d.

TO MY WIFE,

TO WHOM ALSO MY FIRST VOLUME OF ESSAYS
WAS INSCRIBED, THESE MATURER FRUITS OF
A SHARED LIFE ARE GRATEFULLY DEDICATED

PREFACE

I write these lines in the London Zoo’s basement
shelter, to the sound of A.A. guns outside, and inside
the Holst Quartet playing Sibelius’ beautiful Voces Inttmae
on the wireless. It is as good an epitome as any other of
that uniqueness of man which I have taken as the title of
this book.

It also prompts me to try to pull together some of the
threads of thought that, in a book consisting of occasional
articles, inevitably lie somewhat scattered. The fifteen
essays here reprinted were written at various times be-
tween 1927 and 1939, and for very diverse audiences.
But they all have this in common, that they were written
during that strange restless indecisive period during which
an age was dying but most of us were refusing to face the
imminence of its dissolution. Yet anyone who troubled
to think knew that a radical change was overdue; and the
large majority of these articles are efforts towards some
new formulation of our basic beliefs and attitudes, or at
least attempts to state some of the bases on which the new r
formulation will have to build.

But now the war is tying up the threads. First came
the eight quiet months, when thinking was unhurried,
general, and on the whole abstract; and then the last six
months, when history has forced the pace of thought and
hammered out its own conclusions in men’s minds. Now
I begin to see where my earlier attempts were leading. If
civilization is to recreate itself after the war, it can only do

vii

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

so on the basis of what, for want of a better word, we must
call a social outlook. The essentially economic and mech-
anistic ideals of the great era of laisser-faire no longer
either satisfy or convince. Indeed, it is man’s despair at
their complete failure to honour their rosy promises which
has produced the fantastic and evil system against which
we are now fighting for our lives and for the survival of
anything that can be called civilization. They were
founded in freedom and promised prosperity and equality.
But in place of freedom, men have found themselves en-
slaved to the impersonal machinery of the market; their
purely political equality has been accompanied by gross
economic and social inequality; and the promise of
prosperity has been replaced by mass insecurity and
frustration.

The Nazi system is a negation of any civilized order.
It is a form of black magic designed to exorcize the despair
of men caught in the death-struggles of the laisser-faire
world; but it is negative, nihilistic, and can only advance
by destroying. If the Nazis win the war, the western
world is headed for a period of regimentation which yet
will be unable to hold violence in check, a period in which
destruction will proceed within a portentous framework of
empty organization.

But if we win, civilization is not necessarily safe. It
will only be saved if it can transform itself so as to over-
come insecurity, frustration and despair. And it can only
transform itself if it finds a new basis, a new substance for
its belief in itself. The new belief must be a social one,
based on the concept of society as an organic whole, in
which rights and duties are balanced deliberately, as they
are automatically balanced in the tissues of the animal

viii

PREFACE

body. Economic values must lose their primacy, and
become subordinated to social values.

Force of circumstances has pushed the nations some
way along this road. Subsidized housing, free milk,
social security legislation, health insurance, free educa-
tion, Kraft durch Freude in Germany, the C.C.C. in
America — these are all symptoms of the change. But
they have all been conceived ad hoc , to meet some par-
ticular need, and are still, in the democratic countries,
somewhat apologetic interlopers into a world ruled by
economic ideals. The war is an interlude — appallingly
urgent, but yet an interlude. The most vital task of the
present age is to formulate a social basis for civilization,
to dethrone economic ideals and replace them by human
ones.

A foreword is not the place to discuss such a formidable
project, even if I were competent to do so. But it is
within my competence to point out that biology has some
relevance to the task. The task is not merely an empirical
one. It cannot be accomplished on a basis of pure logic
and rationality, or on one of preconceived abstract ideas.
It requires a new world-picture as its basis, a new frame-
work of ideas. And biology is needed to give that picture
its proper background. Man as an organism, but a
unique and very strange organism, human evolution as an
integral part of life’s evolution, but operating through
novel and peculiar mechanisms — without this background
our world-picture will be falsified, and our attempts at
transforming our civilization will wholly or partly fail.

That is where the biologist, provided he is willing to
face the unfamiliar problems of human biology and not
take the easy course of excluding his own species from his

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

subject, can make his contribution — not an immediately
practical nor a very large one, but yet one that is essential.

To the biologist who is not afraid of being a humanist
as well, the essence of human life is seen in social relation-
ships. Out of those relations of men in society spring the
values which we must excavate from their matrix of
custom and organization, and clarify as the conscious
basis of the new order.

I do not pretend that this formulation was present in
my mind when I wrote any of the essays here collected.
But in one way or another it is implicit in most of them,
and it is in its light that I hope they may be read.

The separate articles appeared as follows: — ‘Religion
as an Objective Problem’ in Discovery \ ‘Eugenics and
Society’ in the Eugenics Review ; ‘The Intelligence of
Birds’ in the Strand Magazine ; ‘Life Can Be Worth
Living’ in The Nation and John o' London s Weekly \
‘Climate and Human History’ and ‘The Size of Living
Things’ in the Atlantic Monthly ; ‘The Courtship of
Animals’ in The Forum ; ‘The Concept of Race in the
Light of Modern Genetics’ and ‘Mice and Men’ in
Harper s Magazine (the latter also in the Cornhill)\ ‘The
Analysis of Fame’ in the Saturday Review of Literature ;
‘Science, Natural and Social’ (‘The Science of Society’)
and ‘ The Origins of Species ’ in the Scientific Monthly and
the Virginia Quarterly Review ; ‘Scientific Humanism’
(‘Human Power and Its Control’) and ‘The Uniqueness
of Man’ in the Tale Review ; ‘ The Way of the Dodo’ in
The Times . To the editors and proprietors of these journals
I offer my thanks for their kind permission to reprint.

London,

October 29th, 1940.

CONTENTS

Preface vii

I. The Uniqueness of Man i

II. Eugenics and Society 34

III. Climate and Human History 85

IV. The Concept of Race 106

V. The Size of Living Things 127

VI. The Origins of Species 152

VII. Mice and Men 164

VIII. The Way of the Dodo 183

IX. The Courtship of Animals 190

X. The Intelligence of Birds 207

XI. Science, Natural and Social 222

XII. The Analysis of Fame 252

XIII. Scientific Humanism 260

XIV. Religion as an Objective Problem 277

XV. Life Can Be Worth Living 291

FIGURES IN TEXT

A diagram of relative sizes. In each major
division (A, B, C, D, E) of the diagram,
all the creatures are drawn to the same
scale. The smallest of each division is
enlarged to make the largest of the divi-
sion following pages 128-129

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

M an’s opinion of his own position in relation to the
rest of the animals has swung pendulum-wise be-
tween too great or too little a conceit of himself, fixing now
too large a gap between himself and the animals, now too
small. The gap, of course, can be diminished or increased
at either the animal or the human end. One can, like
Descartes, make animals too mechanical, or, like most
unsophisticated people, humanize them too much. Or
one can work at the human end of the gap, and then either
dehumanize one’s own kind into an animal species like
any other, or superhumanize it into beings a little lower
than the angels.

Primitive and savage man, the world over, not only
accepts his obvious kinship with the animals but also pro-
jects into ^hem many of his own attributes. So far as we
can judge, he has very little pride in his own humanity.
With the advent of settled civilization, economic strati-
fication, and the development of an elaborate religion as
the ideological mortar of a now class-ridden society, the
pendulum began slowly to swing in the other direction.
Animal divinities and various physiological functions such
as fertility gradually lost their sacred importance. Gods
became anthropomorphic and human psychological quali-
ties pre-eminent. Man saw himself as a being set apart,
with the rest of the animal kingdom created to serve his
needs and pleasure, with no share in salvation, no position

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

in eternity. In western civilization this swing of the
pendulum reached its limit in developed Christian the-
ology and in the philosophy of Descartes : both alike in-
serted a qualitative and unbridgeable barrier between all
men and any animals.

With Darwin, the reverse swing was started. Man
was once again regarded as an animal, but now in the light
of science rather than of unsophisticated sensibility. At
the outset, the consequences of the changed outlook were
not fully explored. The unconscious prejudices and atti-
tudes of an earlier age survived, disguising many of the
moral and philosophical implications of the new outlook.
But gradually the pendulum reached the furthest point of
its swing. What seemed the logical consequences of the
Darwinian postulates were faced: man is an animal like
any other; accordingly, his views as to the special mean-
ing of human life and human ideals need merit no more
consideration in the light of eternity (or of evolution) than
those of a bacillus or a tapeworm. Survival is the only
criterion of evolutionary success: therefore, all existing
organisms are of equal value. The idea of progress is a
mere anthropomorphism. Man happens to be the domi-
nant type at the moment, but he might be replaced by the
ant or the rat. And so on.

The gap between man and animal was here reduced not
by exaggerating the human qualities of animals, but by
minimizing the human qualities of men. Of late years,
however, a new tendency has become apparent. It may be
that this is due mainly to the mere increase of knowledge
and the extension of scientific analysis. It may be that it
has been determined by social and psychological causes.
Disillusionment with laisser-faire in the human economic

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

sphere may well have spread to the planetary system of
laisser-faire that we call natural selection. With the crash
of old religious, ethical, and political systems, man’s des-
perate need for some scheme of values and ideals may have
prompted a more critical re-examination of his biological
position. Whether this be so is a point that I must leave
to the social historians. The fact remains that the pen-
dulum is again on the swing, the man-animal gap again
broadening. After Darwin, man could no longer avoid
considering himself as an animal; but he is beginning to
see himself as a very peculiar and in many ways a unique
animal. The analysis of man’s biological uniqueness is as
yet incomplete. This essay is an attempt to review its
present position.

The first and most obviously unique characteristic of
man is his capacity for conceptual thought; if you prefer
objective terms, you will say his employment of true
speech, but that is only another way of saying the same
thing. True speech involves the use of verbal signs for
objects, not merely for feelings. Plenty of animals can
express the fact that they are hungry; but none except
man can ask for an egg or a banana. And to have words
for objects at once implies conceptual thought, since an
object is always one of a class. No doubt, children and
savages are as unaware of using conceptual thought as
Monsieur Jourdain was unaware of speaking in prose;
but they cannot avoid it. Words are tools which auto-
matically carve concepts out of experience. The faculty
of recognizing objects as members of a class provides the
potential basis for the concept: the use of words at once
actualizes the potentiality.

This basic human property has had many consequences.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

The most important was the development of a cumulative
tradition. The beginnings of tradition, by wl*ich experi-
ence is transmitted from one generation to the next, are to
be seen in many higher animals. But in no case is the
tradition cumulative. Offspring learn from parents, but
they learn the same kind and quantity of lessons as they,
in turn, impart: the transmission of experience never
bridges more than one generation. In man, however,
tradition is an independent and potentially permanent
activity, capable of indefinite improvement in quality and
increase in quantity. It constitutes a new accessory pro-
cess of heredity in evolution, running side by side with
the biological process, a heredity of experience to supple-
ment the universal heredity of living substance.

The existence of a cumulative tradition has as its chief
consequence — or if you prefer, its chief objective mani-
festation — the progressive improvement of human tools
and machinery. Many animals employ tools; but they
are always crude tools employed in a crude way. Elabor-
ate tools and skilled technique can develop only with the
aid of speech and tradition.

In the perspective of evolution, tradition and tools are
the characters which have given man his dominant posi-
tion among organisms. This biological dominance is, at
present, another of man’s unique properties. In each
geological epoch of which we have knowledge, there have
been types which must be styled biologically dominant:
they multiply, they extinguish or reduce competing types,
they extend their range, they radiate into new modes of
life. Usually at any one time there is one such type — the
placental mammals, for instance, in the Cenozoic Epoch ;
but sometimes there is more than one. The Mesozoic is

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

usually called the Age of Reptiles, but in reality the rep-
tiles were then competing for dominance with the insects :
in earlier periods we should be hard put to it to decide
whether trilobites, nautiloids, or early fish were the domi-
nant type. To-day, however, there is general agreement
that man is the sole type meriting the title. Since the
early Pleistocene, widespread extinction has diminished
the previously dominant group of placental mammals, and
man has not merely multiplied, but has evolved, extended
his range, and increased the variety of his modes of life.

Biology thus reinstates man in a position analogous to
that conferred on him as Lord of Creation by theology.
There are, however, differences, and differences of some
importance for our general outlook. In the biological
view, the other animals have not been created to serve
man’s needs, but man has evolved in such a way that he
has been able to eliminate some competing types, to en-
slave others by domestication, and to modify physical and
biological conditions over the larger part of the earth’s
land area. The theological view was not true in detail or
in many of its implications ; but it had a solid biological
basis.

Speech, tradition, and tools have led to many other
unique properties of man. These are, for the most part,
obvious and well known, and I propose to leave them
aside until I have dealt with some less familiar human
characteristics. For the human species, considered as a
species, is unique in certain purely biological attributes;
and these have not received the attention they deserve,
either from the zoological or the sociological standpoint.

In the first place, man is by far the most variable wild
species known. Domesticated species like dog, horse, or

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

fowl may rival or exceed him in this particular, but their
variability has obvious reasons, and is irrelevant to our
inquiry.

In correlation with his wide variability, man has a far
wider range than any other animal species, with the pos-
sible exception of some of his parasites. Man is also
unique as a dominant type. All other dominant types
have evolved into many hundreds or thousands of separate
species, grouped in numerous genera, families, and larger
classificatory groups. The human type has maintained
its dominance without splitting: man’s variety has been
achieved within the limits of a single species.

Finally, man is unique among higher animals in the
method of his evolution. Whereas, in general, animal
evolution is divergent, human evolution is reticulate. By
this is meant that in animals, evolution occurs by the isola-
tion of groups which then become progressively more
different in their genetic characteristics, so that the course
of evolution can be represented as a divergent radiation of
separate lines, some of which become extinct, others con-
tinue unbranched, and still others divergently branch
again. Whereas in man, after incipient divergence, the
branches have come together again, and have generated
new diversity from their Mendelian recombinations, this
process being repeated until the course of human descent
is like a network.

All these biological peculiarities are interconnected.
They depend on man’s migratory propensities, which
themselves arise from his fundamental peculiarities, of
speech, social life, and relative independence of environ-
ment. They depend again on his capacity, when choosing
mates, for neglecting large differences of colour and ap-

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

pearance which would almost certainly be more than
enough to deter more instinctive and less'plastic animals.
Thus divergence, though it appears to have gone quite a
long way in early human evolution, generating the very
distinct white, black, and yellow subspecies and perhaps
others, was never permitted to attain its normal culmina-
tion. Mutually infertile groups were never produced:
man remained a single species. Furthermore, crossing
between distinct types, which is a rare and extraordinary
phenomenon in other animals, in him became normal and
of major importance. According to Mendelian laws, such
crosses generate much excess variability by producing
new recombinations. Man is thus more variable than
other species for two reasons. First, because migration
has recaptured for the single interbreeding group diverg-
ences of a magnitude that in animals would escape into the
isolation of separate species; and secondly, because the
resultant crossing has generated recombinations which
both quantitatively and qualitatively are on a far bigger
scale than is supplied by the internal variability of even the
numerically most abundant animal species.

We may contrast this with the state of affairs among
ants, the dominant insect group. The ant type is more
varied than the human type ; but it has achieved this vari-
ability by intense divergent evolution. Several thousand
species of ants are l^nown, and the number is being added
to each year with the increase of biological exploration.
Ways of life among ants are divided among different sub-
types, each rigidly confined to its own methods. Thus
even if ants were capable of accumulating experience,
there could exist no single world-wide ant tradition. The
fact that the human type comprises but one biological

THE UNIQUENESS O.F MAN

species is a consequence of his capacity for tradition, and
also permits his exploitation of that unique capacity to the
utmost.

Let us remind ourselves that superposed upon this
purely biological or genetic variability is the even greater
amount of variability due to differences of upbringing,
profession, and personal tastes. The final result is a degree
of variation that would be staggering if it were not so
familiar. It would be fair to say that, in respect to mind
and outlook, individual human beings are separated by
differences as profound as those which distinguish the
major groups of the animal kingdom. The difference be-
tween a somewhat subnormal member of a savage tribe
and a Beethoven or a Newton is assuredly comparable in
extent with that between a sponge and a higher mammal.
Leaving aside such vertical differences, the lateral differ-
ence between the mind of, say, a distinguished general or
engineer of extrovert type and of an introvert genius in
mathematics or religious mysticism is no less than that
between an insect and a vertebrate. This enormous range
of individual variation in human minds often leads to mis-
understanding and even mutual incomprehensibility; but
it also provides the necessary basis for fruitful division of
labour in human society.

Another biological peculiarity of man is the uniqueness
of his evolutionary history. Writers have indulged their
speculative fancy by imagining other organisms endowed
with speech and conceptual thought — talking rats, rational
ants, philosophic dogs, and the like. But closer analysis
shows that these fantasies are impossible. A brain cap-
able of conceptual thought could not have been developed
elsewhere than in a human body.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

The course followed by evolution appears to have been
broadly as follows. From a generalized early type, various
lines radiate out, exploiting the environment in various
ways. Some of these comparatively soon reach a limit to
their evolution, at least as regards major alteration. There-
after they are limited to minor changes such as the forma-
tion of new genera and species. Others, on the other
hand, are so constructed that they can continue their career,
generating new types which are successful in the struggle
for existence because of their greater control over the en-
vironment and their greater independence of it. Such
changes are legitimately called ‘progressive.’ The new
type repeats the process. It radiates out into a number of
lines, each specializing in a particular direction. The
great majority of these come up against dead ends and can
advance no further: specialization is one-sided progress,
and after a longer or shorter time, reaches a biomechanical
limit. The horse stock cannot reduce its digits below one ;
the elephants are near the limits of size for terrestrial
animals; feathered flight cannot become aerodynamically
more efficient than in existing birds, and so on.

Sometimes all the branches of a given stock have come
up against their limit, and then either have become extinct
or have persisted without major change. This happened,
for instance, to the echinoderms, which with their sea-
urchins, starfish, brittle-stars, sea-lilies, sea-cucumbers,
and other types now extinct had pushed the life that was in
them into a series of blind alleys : they have not advanced
for perhaps a hundred million years, nor have they given
rise to other major types.

In other cases, all but one or two of the lines suffer this
fate, while the rest repeat the process. All reptilian lines

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

were blind alleys save two— one which was transformed
into the birds, and another which became the mammals.
Of the bird stock, all lines came to a dead end; of the
mammals, all but one — the one which became man.

Evolution is thus seen as an enormous number of blind
alleys, with a very occasional path of progress. It is like a
maze in which almost all turnings are wrong turnings.
The goal of the evolutionary maze, however, is not a
central chamber, but a road which will lead indefinitely
onwards.

If now* we look back upon the past history of life, we
shall see that the avenues of progress have been steadily
reduced in number, until by the Pleistocene period, or
even earlier, only one was left. Let us remember that we
can and must judge early progress in the light of its latest
steps. The most recent step has been the acquisition of
conceptual thought, which has enabled man to dethrone
the non-human mammals from their previous position of
dominance. It is biologically obvious that conceptual
thought could never have arisen save in an animal, so that
all plants, both green and otherwise, are at once elimin-
ated. As regards animals, I need not detail all the early
steps in their progressive evolution. Since some degree of
bulk helps to confer independence of the forces of nature,
it is obvious that the combination of many cells to form a
large individual was one necessary step, thus eliminating
all single-celled forms from such progress. Similarly,
progress is barred to specialized animals with no blood-
system, like planarian worms; to internal parasites, like
tapeworms; to animals with radial symmetry and conse-
quently no head, like echinoderms.

Of the three highest animal groups — the molluscs, the

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

arthropods, and the vertebrates — the molluscs advanced
least far. One condition for the later steps in biological
progress was land life. The demands made upon the
organism by exposure to air and gravity called forth bio-
logical mechanisms, such as limbs, sense-organs, protect-
ive skin, and sheltered development, which were necessary
foundations for later advance. And the ^molluscs have
never been able to produce efficient terrestrial forms: their
culmination is in marine types like squid and octopus.

The arthropods, on the other hand, have scored their
greatest successes on land, with the spiders and especially
the insects. Yet the fossil record reveals a lack of all ad-
vance, even in the most successful types such as ants, for a
long time back — certainly during the last thirty million
years, probably during the whole of the Tertiary Epoch.
Even during the shorter of these periods, the mammals
were still evolving rapidly, and man’s rise is contained in a
fraction of this time.

What was it that cut the insects off from progress ? The
answer appears to lie in their breathing mechanism. The
land arthropods have adopted the method of air-tubes or
tracheae, branching to microscopic size and conveying
gases directly to and from the tissues, instead of using the
dual mechanism of lungs and bloodstream. The laws of
gaseous diffusion are such that respiration by tracheae is
extremely efficient for very small animals, but becomes
rapidly less efficient with increase of size, until it ceases to
be of use at a bulk below that of a house mouse. It is for
this reason that no insect has ever become, by vertebrate
standards, even moderately large.

It is for the same reason that no insect has ever become
even moderately intelligent. The fixed pathways of in-

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

stinct, however elaborate, require far fewer nerve-cells
than the multiple switchboards that underlie intelligence.
It appears to be impossible to build a brain mechanism for
flexible behaviour with less than a quite large minimum of
neurones ; and no insect has reached a size to provide this
minimum.

Thus only the land vertebrates are left. The reptiles
shared biological dominance with the insects in the Meso-
zoic. But while the insects had reached the end of their
blind alley, the reptiles showed themselves capable of
further advance. Temperature regulation is a necessary
basis for final progress, since without it the rate of bodily
function could never be stabilized, and without such stab-
ilization, higher mental processes could never become
accurate and dependable.

Two reptilian lines achieved this next step, in the guise
of the birds and the mammals. The birds soon, however,
came to a dead end, chiefly because their forelimbs were
entirely taken up in the specialization for flight. The sub-
human mammals made another fundamental advance, in
the shape of internal development, permitting the young
animal to arrive at a much more advanced stage before it
was called upon to face the world. They also (like the
birds) developed true family life.

Most mammalian lines, however, cut themselves off
from indefinite progress by one-sided evolution, turning
their limbs and jaws into specialized and therefore limited
instruments. And, for the most part, they relied mainly
on the crude sense of smell, which cannot present as
differentiated a pattern of detailed knowledge as can sight.
Finally, the majority continued to produce their young
several at a time, in litters. As J. B. S. Haldane has

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

pointed out, this gives rise to an acute struggle for exist-
ence in the prenatal period, a considerable percentage of
embryos being aborted or resorbed. Such intra-uterine
selection will put a premium upon rapidity of growth and
differentiation, since the devil takes the hindmost; and
this rapidity of development will tend automatically to be
carried on into postnatal growth.

As everyone knows, man is characterized by a rate of
development which is abnormally slow as compared with
that of any other mammal. The period from birth to the
first onset of sexual maturity comprises nearly a quarter of
the normal span of his life, instead of an eighth, a tenth or
twelfth, as in some other animals. This again is in one
sense a unique characteristic of man, although from the
evolutionary point of view it represents merely the ex-
aggeration of a tendency which is operative in other
Primates. In any case, it is a necessary condition for the
evolution and proper utilization of rational thought. If
men and women were, like mice, confronted with the
problems of adult life and parenthood after a few weeks, or
even, like whales, after a couple of years, they could never
acquire the skills of body and mind that they now absorb
from and contribute to the social heritage of the species.

This slowing (or < foetalization, , as Bolk has called it,
since it prolongs the foetal characteristics of earlier ances-
tral forms into postnatal development and even into adult
life) has had other important by-products for man. Here
I will mention but one — his nakedness. The distribution
of hair on man is extremely similar to that on a late foetus
of a chimpanzee, and there can be little doubt that it repre-
sents an extension of this temporary anthropoid phase into
permanence. Hairlessness of body is not a unique bio-

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

logical characteristic of man ; but it is unique among ter-
restrial mammals, save for a few desert creatures, and
some others which have compensated for loss of hair by
developing a pachydermatous skin. In any case, it has
important biological consequences, since it must have en-
couraged the comparatively defenceless human creatures
in their efforts to protect themselves against animal ene-
mies and the elements, and so has been a spur to the
improvement of intelligence.

Now, foetalization could never have occurred in a mam-
mal producing many young at a time, since intra-uterine
competition would have encouraged the opposing tend-
ency. Thus we may conclude that conceptual thought
could develop only in a mammalian stock which normally
brings forth but one young at a birth. Such a stock is
provided in the Primates — lemurs, monkeys, and apes.

The Primates also have another characteristic which
was necessary for the ancestor of a rational animal — they
are arboreal. It may seem curious that living in trees is a
prerequisite of conceptual thought. But Elliot Smith’s
analysis has abundantly shown that only in an arboreal
mammal could the forelimb become a true hand, and sight
become dominant over smell. Hands obtain an elaborate
tactile pattern of what they handle, eyes an elaborate visual
pattern of what they see. The combination of the two
kinds of pattern, with the aid of binocular vision, in the
higher centres of the brain allowed the Primate to acquire
a wholly new richness of knowledge about objects, a
wholly new possibility of manipulating them. Tree life
laid the foundation both for the fuller definition of objects
by conceptual thought and for the fuller control of them
by tools and machines.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Higher Primates have yet another prerequisite of
human intelligence — they are all gregarious. Speech, it is
obvious, could never have been evolved in a solitary type.
And speech is as much the physical basis of conceptual
thought as is protoplasm the physical basis of life.

For the passage, however, of the critical point between
subhuman and human, between the biological subordina-
tion and the biological primacy of intelligence, between a
limited and a potentially unlimited tradition — for this it
was necessary for the arboreal animal to descend to the
ground again. Only in a terrestrial creature could fully
erect posture be acquired; and this was essential for the
final conversion of the arms from locomotor limbs into
manipulative hands. Furthermore, just as land life, ages
previously, had demanded and developed a greater variety
of response than had been required in the water, so now it
did the same in relation to what had been required in the
trees. An arboreal animal could never have evolved the
-skill of the hunting savage, nor ever have proceeded to the
domestication of other animals or to agriculture.

We are now in a position to define the uniqueness of
human evolution. The essential character of man as a
dominant organism is conceptual thought. And concept-
ual thought could have arisen only in a multicellular
animal, an animal with bilateral symmetry, head and blood
system, a vertebrate as against a mollusc or an arthropod,
a land vertebrate among vertebrates, a mammal among
land vertebrates. Finally, it could have arisen only in a
mammalian line which was gregarious, which produced
one young at a birth instead of several, and which had
recently become terrestrial after a long period of arboreal
life.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

There is only one group of animals which fulfils these
conditions — a terrestrial offshoot of the higher Primates
Thus not merely has conceptual thought been evolved
only in man: it could not have been evolved except in
man. There is but one path of unlimited progress through
the evolutionary maze. The course of human evolution is
as unique as its result. It is unique not in the trivial sense
of being a different course from that of any other organ-
ism, but in the profounder sense of being the only path
that could have achieved the essential characters of man.
Conceptual thought on this planet is inevitably associated
with a particular type of Primate body and Primate brain.

A further property of man in which he is unique among
higher animals concerns his sexual life. Man is prepared
to mate at any time : animals are not. To start with, most
animals have a definite breeding season ; only during this
period are their reproductive organs fully developed and
functional. In addition to this, higher animals have o,ne
or more sexual cycles within their breeding seasons, and
only at one phase of the cycle are they prepared to mate.
In general, either a sexual season or a sexual cycle, or both,
operates to restrict mating.

In man, however, neither of these factors, is at work,
There appear to be indications of a breeding season in
some primitive peoples like the Eskimo, but even there
they are but relics. Similarly, while there still exist phy-
siological differences in sexual desire at different phases
^of the female sexual cycle, these are purely quantitative,
and may readily be overridden by psychological factors.
Man, to put it briefly, is continuously sexed: animals are
discontinuously sexed. If we try to imagine what a human
society would be like in which the sexes were interested in

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

each other only during the summer, as in songbirds, or, as
in female dogs, experienced sexual desire only once every
few months, or even only once in a lifetime, as in ants, we
catn realize what this peculiarity has meant. In this, as in
his slow growth and prolonged period of dependence, man
is not abruptly marked off from all other animals, but
represents the culmination of a process that can be clearly
traced among other Primates. What the biological mean-
ing of this evolutionary trend may be is difficult to under-
stand. One suggestion is that it may be associated with
the rise of mind to dominance. The bodily functions, in
lower mammals rigidly determined by physiological mech-
anisms, come gradually under the more plastic control of
the brain. But this, for what it is worth, is a mere
speculation.

Another of the purely biological characters in which
man is unique is his reproductive variability. In a given
species of animals, the maximum litter-size may, on occa-
sions, reach perhaps double the minimum, according to
circumstances of food and temperature, or even perhaps
threefold. But during a period of years, these variations
will be largely equalized within a range of perhaps fifty
per cent, either way from the average, and the percentage
of wholly infertile adults is very low. In man, on the
other hand, the range of positive fertility is enormous —
from one to over a dozen, and in exceptional cases to over
twenty; and the number of wholly infertile adults is con-
siderable. This fact, in addition to providing a great
diversity of patterns of family life, has important bearings
on evolution. It means that in the human species differ-
ential fertility is more important as a basis for selection
than is differential mortality; and it provides the possi-
B 17

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

bility of much more rapid selective change than that found
in wild animal species. Such rapidity of evolution would,
of course, be effectively realized only if the stocks with
large families possessed a markedly different hereditary
constitution from those with few children; but the high
differential fertility of unskilled workers as against the pro-
fessional classes in England, or of the French Canadians
against the rest of the inhabitants of Canada, demonstrates
how rapidly populations may change by this means.

Still another point in which man is biologically unique
is the length and relative importance of his period of what
we may call ‘post-maturity/ If we consider the female
sex, in which the transition from reproductive maturity to
non-reproductive post-maturity is more sharply defined
than in the male, we find, in the first place, that in animals
a comparatively small percentage of the population sur-
vives beyond the period of reproduction; in the second
place, that such individuals rarely survive long, and so far
as known never for a period equal to or greater than the
period during which reproduction was possible; and
thirdly, that such individuals are rarely of importance in
the life of the species. The same is true of the male sex,
provided we do not take the incapacity to produce fertile
gametes as the criterion of post-maturity, but rather the
appearance of signs of age, such as the beginnings of loss
of vigour and weight, decreased sexual activity* or greying
hair.

It is true that in some social mammals, notably among
ruminants and Primates, an old male or old female is fre-
quently found as leader of the herd. Such cases, however,
provide the only examples of the special biological utility
of post-mature individuals among animals; they are con-

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

fined to a very small proportion of the population, and it is
uncertain to what extent such individuals are post-mature
in the sense we have defined. In any event, it is improb-
able that the period of post-maturity is anywhere near so
long as that of maturity. But in civilized man the average
expectation of life now includes over ten post-mature years,
and about a sixth of the population enjoys a longer post-
maturity than maturity. What is more, in all advanced
human societies, a large proportion of the leaders of the
community are always post-mature. All the members
of the British War Cabinet are in their post-maturity.

This is truly a remarkable phenomenon. Through the
new social mechanisms made possible by speech and tradi-
tion, man has been able to utilize for the benefit of the
species a period of life which in almost all other creatures
is a mere superfluity. We know that the dominance of the
old can be over-emphasized ; but it is equally obvious that
society cannot do without the post-mature. To act on the
slogan ‘Too old at forty' — or even at forty-five — would
be to rob man of one of his unique characteristics, whereby
he utilizes tradition to the best advantage.

We have now dealt in a broad way with the unique
properties of man both from the comparative and the
evolutionary point of view.* Now we can return to the
present and the particular and discuss these properties and
their consequences a little more in detail. First, let us
remind ourselves that the gap between human and animal
thought is much greater than is usually supposed. The
tendency to project familiar human qualities into animals
is very strong, and colours the ideas of nearly all people
who have not special familiarity both with animal be-
haviour and scientific method.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

.Let us recall a few cases illustrating the unhuman char-
acteristics of animal behaviour. Everyone is familiar with
the rigidity of instinct in insects. Worker ants einerge
from their pupal case equipped not with the instincts to
care for ant grubs in general, but solely with those suitable
to ant grubs of their own species. They will attempt to
care for the grubs of other species, but appear incapable of
learning new methods if their instincts kill their foster
children. Or again, a worker wasp, without food for a
hungry grub, has been known to bite off its charge’s tail
and present it to its head. But even in the fine flowers of
vertebrate evolution, the birds and mammals, behaviour,
though it may be more plastic than in the insects, is as
essentially irrational. Birds, for instance, seem incapable
of analysing unfamiliar situations. For them some ele-
ment in the situation may act as its dominant symbol, the
only stimulus to which they can react. At other times, it
is the organization of the situation as a whole which is the
stimulus: if the whole is interfered with, analysis fails to
dissect out the essential element. A hen meadow-pipit
feeds her young when it gapes and squeaks in the nest.
But if it has been ejected by a young cuckoo, gaping and
squeaking has no effect, and the rightful offspring is
neglected and allowed to die, while the usurper in the nest
is fed. The pipit normally cares for its own young, but
not because it recognizes them as such.

Mammals are no better. A cow deprived of its calf
will be quieted by the provision of a crudely stuffed calf-
skin. Even the Primates are no exception. Female
baboons whose offspring have died will continue carrying
the corpses until they have not merely putrefied but
mummified. This appears to be due not to any profund-

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

ity of grief, but to a contact stimulus: the mother will
react similarly to any moderately small and furry object.

Birds and especially mammals are, of course, capable of
a certain degree of analysis, but this is effected, in the
main, by means of trial and error through concrete experi-
ence. A brain capable of conceptual thought appears to
be the necessary basis for speedy and habitual analysis.
Without it, the practice of splitting up situations into
their components and assigning real degrees of signifi-
cance to the various elements remains rudimentary and
rare, whereas with man, even when habit and trial and
error are prevalent, conceptual thought is of major bio-
logical importance. The' behaviour of animals is essenti-
ally arbitrary, in that it is fixed within narrow limits. In
man it has become relatively free — free at the incoming
and the outgoing ends alike. His capacity for acquiring
knowledge has been largely released from arbitrary sym-
bolism, his capacity for action, from arbitrary canaliza-
tions of instinct. He can thus rearrange the patterns of
experience and action in a far greater variety, and can
escape from the particular into the general.

Thus man is more intelligent than the animals because
his brain mechanism is more plastic. This fact also gives
him, of course, the opportunity of being more nonsensical
and perverse : but its primary effects have been more ana-
lytical knowledge and more varied control. The essen-
tial fact, from my present standpoint, is that the change
has been profound and in an evolutionary sense rapid.
Although it has been brought about by the gradual quan-
titative enlargement of the association areas of the brain,
the result has been almost as abrupt as the change (also
brought about' quantitatively) from solid ice to liquid

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

water. We should remember that the machinery of the
change has been an increase in plasticity and potential
variety: it is by a natural selection of ideas and actions
that the result has been greater rationality instead of
greater irrationality.

This increase of flexibility has also had other psycho-
logical consequences which rational philosophers are apt to
forget: and in some of these, too, man is unique. It has
led, for instance, to the fact that man is the only organism
normally and inevitably subject to psychological conflict.
You can give a dog neurosis, as Pavlov did, by a compli-
cated laboratory experiment: you can find cases of brief
emotional conflict in the lives of wild birds and animals.
But, for the most part, psychological conflict is shirked by
the simple expedient of arranging that now one and now
another instinct should dominate the animal's behaviour.
I remember in Spitsbergen finding the nest of a Red-
throated Diver on the shore of an inland pool. The sitting
bird was remarkably bold. After leaving the nest for the
water, she stayed very close. She did not, however, re-
main in a state of conflict between fear of intruders and
desire to return to her brooding. She would gradually
approach as if to land, but eventually fear became domin-
ant, and when a few feet from the shore she suddenly
dived, and emerged a good way farther out — only to
repeat the process. Here the external circumstances were
such as to encourage conflict, but even so what are the
most serious features of human conflict were minimized
by the outlet of alternate action.

Those who take up bird-watching as a hobby tend at
first to be surprised at the way in which a bird will turn,
apparently without transition or hesitation, from one act-

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

ivity to another — from fighting to peaceable feeding,
from courtship to uninterested preening, from panic flight
to unconcern. However, all experienced naturalists or
those habitually concerned with animals recognize such
behaviour as characteristic of the subhuman level. It
represents another aspect of the type of behaviour I have
just been describing for the Red-throated Diver. In this
case, the internal state of the bird changes, presumably
owing to some form of physiological fatigue or to a di-
minution of intensity of a stimulus with time or distance;
the type of behaviour which had been dominant ceases to
have command over the machinery of action, and is re-
placed by another which just before had been subordinate
and latent.

As a matter of fact, the prevention of conflict between
opposed modes of action is a very general phenomenon,
of obvious biological utility, and it is only the peculiarities
of the human mind which have forced its partial abandon-
ment on man. It begins on the purely mechanical level
with the nervous machinery controlling our muscles. The
main muscles of a limb, for instance, are arranged in two
antagonistic sets, the flexors bending and the extensors
straightening it. It would obviously be futile to throw
both sets into action at the same time, and economical
when one set is in action to reduce to the minimum any re-
sistance offered by the other. This has actually been pro-
vided for. The nervous connections in the spinal cord are
so arranged that when a given muscle receives an impulse
to contract, its antagonist receives an impulse causing it to
lose some of its tone and thus, by relaxing below its normal
level, to offer the least possible resistance to the action of
the active muscle.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Sherrington discovered that the same type of mechan-
ism was operative in regard to the groups of muscles in-
volved in whole reflexes. A dog, for instance, cannot very
well walk and scratch itself at the same time. To avoid
the waste involved in conflict between the walking and the
scratching reflex, the spinal cord is constructed in such a
way that throwing one reflex into action automatically in-
hibits the other. In both these cases, the machinery for
preventing conflicts of activity resides in the spinal cord.
Although the matter has not yet been analysed physio-
logically, it would appear that the normal lack of conflict
between instincts which we have just been discussing is
due to some similar type of nervous mechanism in the
brain.

When we reach the human level, there are new compli-
cations; for, as we have seen, one of the peculiarities of
man is the abandonment of any rigidity of instinct, and the
provision of association-mechanisms by which any activity
of the mind, whether in the spheres of knowing, feeling, or
willing, can be brought into relation with any other. It is
through this that man has acquired the possibility of a
unified mental life. But, by the same token, the door is
opened to the forces of disruption, which may destroy any
such unity and even prevent him from enjoying the effi-
ciency of behaviour attained by animals. For, as Sherring-
ton has emphasized, the nervous system is like a funnel,
with a much larger space for intake than for outflow. The
intake cone of the funnel is represented by the receptor
nerves, conveying impulses inward to the central nervous
system from the sense-organs : the outflow tube is, then,
through the effector nerves, conveying impulses outwards
to the muscles, and there are many more of the former

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

than of the latter. If we like to look at the matter from a
rather different standpoint, we may say that, since action
can be effected only by muscles (strictly speaking, also by
the glands, which are disregarded here for simplicity’s
sake), and since there are a limited number of muscles in
the body, the only way for useful activity to be carried out
is for the nervous system to impose a particular pattern of
action on them, and for all other competing or opposing
patterns to be cut out. Each pattern, when it has seized
control of the machinery of action, should be in supreme
command, like the captain of a ship. Animals are, in
many ways, like ships which are commanded by a number
of captains in turn, each specializing in one kind of action,
and popping up and down between the authority of the
bridge and the obscurity of their private cabins according
to the business on hand. Man is on the way to achieving
permanent unity of command, but the captain has a dis-
concerting way of dissolving into a wrangling committee.

Even on the new basis, however, mechanisms exist for
minimizing conflict. They are what are known by psy-
chologists as suppression and repression. From our point
of view, repression is the more interesting. It implies the
forcible imprisonment of one of two conflicting impulses
in the dungeons of the unconscious mind. The metaphor
is, however, imperfect. For the prisoner in the mental
dungeon can continue to influence the tyrant above in the
daylight of consciousness. In addition to a general neu-
rosis, compulsive thoughts and acts may be thrust upon
the personality. Repression may thus be harmful ; but it
can also be regarded as a biological necessity for dealing
with inevitable conflict in the early years of life, before
rational judgment and control are possible. Better to

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

have the capacity for more or less unimpeded action, even
at the expense of possible neurosis, than an organism con-
stantly inactivated like the ass between the two bundles of
hay, balanced in irresolution.

In repression, not only is the defeated impulse banished
to the unconscious, but the very process of banishment is
itself unconscious. The inhibitory mechanisms concerned
in it must have been evolved to counteract the more
obvious possibilities of conflict, especially in early life,
which arose as by-products of the human type of mind.

In suppression, the banishment is conscious, so that
neurosis is not likely to appear. Finally, in rational judg-
ment, neither of the conflicting impulses is relegated to
the unconscious, but they are balanced in the light of
reason and experience, and control of action is consciously
exercised.

I need not pursue the subject further. Here I am only
concerned to show that the great biological adyantages
conferred on man by the unification of mind have inevit-
ably brought with them certain counterbalancing defects.
The freedom of association between all aspects and pro-
cesses of the mind has provided the basis for conceptual
thought and tradition ; but it has also provided potential
antagonists, which in lower organisms were carefully kept
apart, with the opportunity of meeting face to face, and
has thus made some degree of conflict unavoidable.

In rather similar fashion, man's upright posture has
brought with it certain consequential disadvantages in
regard to the functioning of his internal organs and his
proneness to rupture. Thus man's unique characteristics
are by no means wholly beneficial.

In close correlation with our subjection to conflict is our

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

proneness to laughter. So characteristic of our species is
laughter that man has been defined as the laughing animal.
It is true that, like so much else of man’s uniqueness, it has
its roots among the animals, where it reveals itself as an
expression of a certain kind of general pleasure — and thus
in truth perhaps more of a smile than a laugh. And in a
few animals — ravens, for example, — there are traces of a
malicious sense of humour. Laughter in man, however, is
much more than this. There are many theories of laugh-
ter, most of them containing a partial truth. But bio-
logically the important feature of human laughter seems
to lie in its providing a release for conflict, a resolution of
troublesome situations.

This and other functions of laughter can be exagger-
ated so that it becomes as the crackling of thorns under the
pot, and prevents men from taking anything seriously;
but in due proportion its value is very great as a lubricant
against troublesome friction and a lightener of the inevit-
able gravity and horror of life, which would otherwise
become portentous and overshadowing. True laughter,
like true speech, is a unique possession of man.

Those of man’s unique characteristics which may better
be called psychological and social than narrowly biological
spring from one or other of three characteristics. The
first is his capacity for abstract and general thought: the
second is the relative unification of his mental processes, as
against the much more rigid compartmentalization of
animal mind and behaviour: the third is the existence of
social units, such as tribe, nation, party, and church, with
a continuity of their own, based on organized tradition
and culture.

There are various by-products of the change from pre-

2 7

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

human to the human type of mind which are, of course,
also unique biologically. Let us enumerate a few: pure
mathematics; musical gifts; artistic appreciation and
creation; religion; romantic love.

Mathematical ability appears, almost inevitably, as
something mysterious. Yet the attainment of speech,
abstraction, and logical thought, bring it into potential
being. It may remain in a very rudimentary state of de-
velopment; but even the simplest arithmetical calculations
are a manifestation of its existence. Like any other human
activity, it requires proper tools and machinery. Arabic
numerals, algebraic conventions, logarithms, the differ-
ential calculus, are such tools: each one unlocks new
possibilities of mathematical achievement. But just as
there is no essential difference between man’s conscious
use of a chipped flint as an implement and his design of
the most elaborate machine, so there is none between such
simple operations as numeration or addition and the com-
prehensive flights of higher mathematics. Again, some
people are by nature more gifted than others in this field ;
yet no normal human being is unable to perform some
mathematical operations. Thus the capacity for mathe-
matics is, as I have said, a by-product of the human type
of mind.

We have seen, however, that the human type of mind is
distinguished by two somewhat opposed attributes. One
is the capacity for abstraction, the other for synthesis.
Mathematics is one of the extreme by-products of our
capacity for abstraction. Arithmetic abstracts objects of
all qualities save their enumerability; the symbol 7 r ab-
stracts in a single Greek letter a complicated relation be-
tween the parts of all circles. Art, on the other hand, is an

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

extreme by-product of our capacity for synthesis. In one
unique production, the painter can bring together form,
colour, arrangement, associations of memory, emotion,
and idea. Dim adumbrations of art are to be found in a
few creatures such as bower-birds ; but nothing is found
to which the word can rightly be applied until man’s mind
gave the possibility of freely mingling observations, emo-
tions, memories, and ideas, and subjecting the mixture to
deliberate control.

But it is not enough here to enumerate a few special
activities. In point of fact, the great majority of man’s
activities and characteristics are by-products of his prim-
ary distinctive characteristics, and therefore, like them,
biologically unique.

On the one hand, conversation, organized games, edu-
cation, sport, paid work, gardening, the theatre; on the
other, conscience, duty, sin, humiliation, vice, penitence
— these are all such unique by-products. The trouble,
indeed, is to find any human activities which are not
unique. Even the fundamental biological attributes such
as eating, sleeping, and mating have been tricked out by
man with all kinds of unique frills and peculiarities.

There may be other by-products of man’s basic unique-
ness which have not yet been exploited. For let us re-
member that such by-products may remain almost wholly
latent until demand stimulates invention and invention
facilitates development. It is asserted that there exist
human tribes who cannot count above two ; certainly some
savages stop at ten. Here the mathematical faculty is re-
stricted to numeration, and stops short at a very rudiment-
ary stage of this rudimentary process. Similarly, there are
human societies in which art has never been developed

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

beyond the stage of personal decoration. It is probable
that during the first half of the Pleistocene period, none of
the human race had developed either their mathematical
or their artistic potentialities beyond such a rudimentary
stage.

It is perfectly possible that to-day man's so-called super-
normal or extra-sensory faculties are in the same case as
were his mathematical faculties during the first or second
glaciations of the Ice Age — barely more than a potential-
ity, with no technique for eliciting and developing them,
no tradition behind them to give them continuity and
intellectual respectability. Even such simple perform-
ances as multiplying two three-figure numbers would have
appeared entirely magical to early Stone Age men.

Experiments such as those of Rhine and Tyrrell on extra-
sensory guessing, experiences like those of Gilbert Murray
on thought transference, and the numerous sporadic re-
cords of telepathy and clairvoyance suggest that some
people at least possess possibilities of knowledge which are
not confined within the ordinary channels of sense-percep-
tion. Tyrrell's work is particularly interesting in this con-
nection. As a result of an enormous number of trials with
apparatus ingeniously designed to exclude all alternative
explanation, he finds that those best endowed with this
extra-sensory gift can guess right about once in four times
when once in five would be expected on chance alone.
The results are definite, and significant in the statistical
sense, yet the faculty is rudimentary : it does not permit
its possessor to guess right all the time or even most of the
time — merely to achieve a small rise in the percentage of
right guessing. If, however, we could discover in what
this faculty really consists, on what mechanism it depends,

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

and by what conditions and agencies it can be influenced,
it should be capable of development like any other human
faculty. Man may thus be unique in more ways than he
now suspects.

So far we have been considering the fact of human
uniqueness. It remains to consider man’s attitude to these
unique qualities of his. Professor Everett, of the Univer-
sity of California, in an interesting paper bearing the same
title as this essay, but dealing with the topic from the
standpoint of the philosopher and the humanist rather
than that of the biologist, has stressed man’s fear of his
own uniqueness. Man has often not been able to tolerate
the feeling that he inhabits an alien world, whose laws do
not make sense in the light of his intelligence, and in
which the writ of his human values does not run. Faced
with the prospect of such intellectual and moral loneliness,
he has projected personality into the cosmic scheme. Here
he has found a will, there a purpose; here a creative in-
telligence, and there a divine compassion. At one time,
he has deified animals, or personified natural forces. At
others, he has created a superhuman pantheon, a single
tyrannical world ruler, a subtle and satisfying Trinity in
Unity. Philosophers have postulated an Absolute of the
same nature as mind.

It is only exceptionally that men have dared to uphold
their uniqueness and to be proud of their human superior-
ity to the impersonality and irrationality of the rest of the
universe. It is time now, in the light of our knowledge, to
be brave and face the fact and the consequences of our
uniqueness. That is Dr Everett’s view, as it was also that
of T. H. Huxley in his famous Romanes lecture. I agree
with them; but I would suggest that the antinomy be-

3 *

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

tween man and the universe is not quite so sharp as they
have made out. Man represents the culmination of that
process of organic evolution which has been proceeding on
this planet for over a thousand million years. That process,
however wasteful and cruel it may be, and into however
many blind alleys it may have been diverted, is also in one
aspect progressive. Man has now become the sole repre-
sentative of life in that progressive aspect and its sole
trustee for any progress in the future.

Meanwhile it is true that the appearance of the human
type of mind, the latest step in evolutionary progress, has
introduced both new methods and new standards. By
means of his conscious reason and its chief offspring,
science, man has the power of substituting less dilatory,
less wasteful, and less cruel methods of effective progress-
ive change than those of natural selection, which alone are
available to lower organisms. And by means of his con-
scious purpose and his set of values, he has the power of
substituting new and higher standards for change than
those of mere survival and adaptation to immediate cir-
cumstances, which alone are inherent in pre-human evolu-
tion. To put the matter in another way, progress has
hitherto been a rare and fitful by-product of evolution.
Man has the possibility of making it the main feature of
his own future evolution, and of guiding its course in
relation to a deliberate aim.

But he must not be afraid of his uniqueness. There
may be other beings in this vast universe endowed with
reason, purpose, and aspiration : but we know nothing of
them. So far as our knowledge goes, human mind and
personality are unique and constitute the highest product
yet achieved by the cosmos. Let us not put off our. re-

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

sponsibilitics onto the shoulders of mythical gods or phil-
osophical absolutes, but shoulder them in the hopefulness
of tempered pride. In the perspective of biology, our
business in the world is seen to be the imposition of the
best and most enduring of our human standards upon our-
selves and our planet. The enjoyment of beauty and inter-
est, the achievement of goodness and efficiency, the en-
hancement of life and its variety — these are the harvest
which our human uniqueness should be called upon to
yield.

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

E ugenics, Dean Inge writes in one of his essays, is
capable of becoming the most sacred ideal of the
human race, as a race ; one of the supreme religious duties.
In this I entirely agree with him. Once the full implica-
tions of evolutionary biology are grasped, eugenics will
inevitably become part of the religion of the future, or of
whatever complex of sentiments may in the future take
the place of organized religion. It is not merely a sane
outlet for human altruism, but is of all outlets for altru-
ism that which is most comprehensive and of longest
range.

However, in addition to holding out these emotional
possibilities, the eugenic movement must obey practical
necessities. If it is to grow into a soul-compelling ideal,
it must first achieve precision and efficiency as a branch
of applied science.

At the moment, it is idle to pretend that it has advanced
very far in either direction. True that to a limited number
of men and women, it is already an inspiring ideal: but
for the bulk of people, if not a subject for a jest, it remains
either mistrusted or wholly neglected. True that, thanks
to the genius of Darwin and his cousin Galton, the notion
of evolutionary improvement through selection has pro-
vided a firm scientific base for eugenics, and that in recent
years distinct progress has been made in applying the
triumphant discoveries of modern genetics to the human

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

species: yet for the bulk of scientists, eugenics is still
hardly reckoned as a science.

It may be that, as a scientist myself, I overrate the im-
portance of the scientific side. At any rate, it is my con-
viction that eugenics cannot gain power as an ideal and a
motive until it has improved its position as a body of
knowledge and a potential instrument of control: and in
this essay I shall endeavour to point out what, in my
opinion, is the next step towards the graduation of eu-
genics into the dignity of an established science. It will
be an inquiry into the methodology of our subject.

Eugenics falls within the province of the Social Sciences,
not of the Natural Sciences. It shares with the rest of
them a suspicion, often very frankly expressed by the
pundits of more respectable branches of study, such as
physics or pure biology, of being not quite scientifically
respectable. Some, indeed, go as far as to assert that the
social sciences can never be truly scientific, and imply
that they have illegitimately used the word science in their
title in order to exploit the prestige attaching to it in this
scientific age.

Personally, I do not think that this criticism is justified.
All young sciences are attacked by their elders on the
ground of irregularity in their canons of scientific be-
haviour: but they cannot expect to establish rigorous
canons until they are no longer young, any more than an
untried adolescent can be expected to possess the assur-
ance and practical skill of a man in the prime of life. In
addition, young sciences are not merely young like young
human beings owing to the accident of the date of their
birth. The date of their birth is no accident: they are
young because they are more complex and more difficult.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Physics is an older science than biology because in physics
it is easier to isolate phenomena and to discover simple
but fundamental laws. The social sciences are younger
than the natural sciences because of the appalling com-
plexity of variables which make up their subject-matter.

This, however, is not all. The social sciences in certain
respects differ radically from the natural sciences; they
cannot expect to achieve success by applying the same
simple methods as served their elder sisters, but must
work out new methods of their own. In the natural
sciences, we isolate phenomena in order to analyse them.
If possible we isolate them in the form of a controlled
experiment, as in physics or genetics ; if this cannot be
achieved, we isolate them in thought, make deductions,
and test our conclusions by empirical observations, as in
astronomy or stratigraphical geology. By refinements of
technique, we can eliminate for practical purposes all
irrelevant variables; the geneticist wanting to understand
some new type which has appeared in his cultures can
eliminate, say, the variable of environment, then the
variable of single-gene mutations, then the variable of
addition or subtraction of whole chromosomes, and finally
pin responsibility for the phenomenon on, for example,
the inversion of a particular chromosome-section.

But the social scientist cannot do this sort of thing:
he can at the best find a correlation between several
variables. In terms of causation, the natural scientist can
sometimes find a single definite cause for a phenomenon ;
the social scientist must always be content with several
partial causes. He has to work out a system based on the
idea of multiple causation. The attractive simplicity of
simple and single causation is for him a false simplicity:

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

he needs a different intellectual technique. Anyone who
asserts that so-and-so is the cause of a social phenomenon
is bound to be wrong : it can at best be a cause. Let us
as eugenists therefore beware of making such assertions
as that the celibacy of the clergy was the cause of the de-
cadence of Spain, or that the differential birth-rate is the
cause of the increase of feeble-mindedness: for by so
doing we are being scientifically disreputable.

And, of course, the inevitable obverse of the principle
of multiple cause is the principle of multiple effect. I
need not labour the point, save to stress the need for the
working out of suitable methods, of partial correlation and
the like, to deal with this multiple complexity.

Another peculiarity of the social sciences, closely linked
with the first, is that we cannot make rigorous and repeat-
able experiments, because we cannot isolate our material
or control all its variables. Again a different technique
from that of the natural sciences has to be worked out —
here a different practical technique. Properly planned
regional experiments are an example.

But perhaps the most fundamental difference between
natural and social science is that the social scientist is him-
self part of his own material, and that the criteria for
judging the outcome of an experiment are partially sub-
jective. Thus the social scientist cannot escape bias, and
he cannot hope to check his work against objective criteria
that will be accepted by all normal men.

As regards bias, we may compare this with experi-
mental error in natural science. Just as it is possible to
reduce experimental error, but never entirely to eliminate
it, so it is clearly possible to a large extent to discount and
reduce bias. Discovering the technique of reducing bias

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

will be as important in social science as has been in natural
science the long and often tiresome process of discovering
the technique of reducing experimental error.

The difficulty of finding an objective criterion of truth
in social science cuts deeper. But it is based upon an
intellectualist philosophy which hankers after abstract
truth. It largely disappears if we take the more robust
view that science is control as well as knowledge, and that
these two aspects cannot be separated. There can be
some measure of general agreement on the practical
results of social experiments, especially if these are pro-
perly planned. Thus in social science, experiment is not
the remote preliminary to action that it is in natural
science, but is itself partly action — both pure and applied
science simultaneously. Sohitur operando should be the
working principle of the social sciences. It implies that
progress in social science and its applications will be
slower and more sprinkled with practical mistakes than
progress in natural science; but it does not mean that we
should deny its possibility.

These general considerations have many particular
applications to our subject. Eugenics is not, as some of
its devotees have perhaps unconsciously assumed, a
special branch of natural science : it is a branch of social
science. It is not merely human genetics. True that it
aims at the improvement of the human race by means of
the improvement of its genetic qualities. But any im-
provement of the sort can only be realized in a certain
kind of social environment, so that eugenics is inevitably
a particular aspect of the study of man in society.

Up to the present, eugenics has concerned itself prim-
arily with a study of the hereditary constitution, and with

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

deductive reasoning on the effects of selection. It was
rightly shocked at the intellectual excesses of the perfec-
tionists and sentimental environmentalists, who adhered
to the crudest form of Lamarckism and believed that im-
provements in education and social conditions would be
incorporated in an easy automatic way into human nature
itself and so lead to continuous and unlimited evolutionary
progress. As a result, it converted the distinction between
nature and nurture into a hard antithesis, and deliberately
or perhaps subconsciously belittled or neglected the effects
of the environment and the efforts of the social reformers
— except in so far as their real or alleged dysgenic effects
might be used to point a moral or provide a horrid warning.

This was natural, and perhaps necessary; but it was
neither scientific nor sufficient. It was an example of the
error to which I have already referred, the error of assuming
that the methods of the natural sciences will serve for the
social sciences. The pure natural science of genetics was
able, at least during its early career, to neglect considera-
tion of the environment. It could do this because in its
experiments it can and does control the environment in
order to deal solely with constitutional factors. By this
means it has succeeded (and by no other means could it
have succeeded) in making those spectacular discoveries
about chromosomes and their doubling and halving,
about the existence, number and localization of the genes
or hereditary units, their mutation and its effects, which in a
brief quarter-century have raised it to the position of being
that branch of biology which in its method and its progress
most nearly conforms to the standard set by physics.

But in eugenics this is not possible. The purpose of
eugenics is on the one hand to study the presence of

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

different inherited types and traits in a population, and
the fact that these can be increased or diminished in 'the
course of generations as the result of selection, uncon-
scious or deliberate, natural or artificial, and on the other,
eventually to use the results of this study for control.
Eugenics studies the selective implications of human
genetic differences.

However, these implications may and often indeed
must differ in different environments. Since the social
environment is now by far the most important part of the
environment of man; and since the social environment
differs from one nation to another, one period to another,
one class to another, and its differences are outside the
control of the eugenist, he must not neglect it. Its un-
controlled variables bring the eugenist face to face with
the principle of multiple causation, at work here as in all
the social sciences.

The study of the environment is necessary for the eu-
genist on a number of counts. First, because he cannot
equalize it experimentally, he must learn to discount its
effects if he is not to mistake their pinchbeck glitter (as
he would be apt to think it) for the true gold of genetic
influence. If, for instance, the observed lower stature of
the so-called lower classes should prove to be due to an
inadequate diet, it is eugenically of no significance. Sec-
ondly, because by the limited control of social conditions
which is open to us already, it is often possible to alter the
effect of a genetic factor. Inherited eye-defects, once a
grave handicap in almost every walk of life, are now, in
most cases, thanks to the progress of the science of optics
and the art of spectacle-making, no more than a minor
inconvenience.

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

Thirdly, the environment itself exercises a selective
influence. This fundamental truth, long axiomatic in
evolutionary biology, has not been properly recognized
in human biology so far as the social environment is con-
cerned. A young pioneer civilization, for instance, will
both initially attract and later encourage different types
from those attracted and encouraged by a civilization that
is old and settled.

Fourthly, in planning a eugenic programme, the eu-
genist must take account of the social system in which he
hopes or expects his improved race to live. Cattle-breeders
will set about their work quite differently according to
whether they are building up a stock for use in a rich
pasture country where winter feed is provided, or one for
an undeveloped and semi-arid land, like parts of Africa.
Similarly the eugenist must adopt different aims according
as to whether he envisages a world of nationalism and war
or one of peace and cultural progress. This is already
patent in the crude eugenic efforts of to-day — in the en-
couragement of high fecundity in Fascist Italy and Nazi
Germany, together with the persecution of so-called ‘non-
Aryans’ and the glorification of the Nordics in the latter.

Finally, there is the question of bias. It is probably
inevitable that most men who come fresh to a problem in
social science, however scientifically-minded they may be
by nature and training, will have some bias due to their
own social environment. This bias in social outlook
which besets the pioneers in the social sciences is com-
parable to the bias in favour of common sense and ac-
cepted modes of thought which equally inevitably beset
the pioneers in the early stages of the natural sciences.
And just as in the natural sciences men had to develop the

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

technique of controlled experiment and verified prophecy
and to be willing to follow their findings wherever they
might lead, far away from the beaten track of common
sense if need be, so in the social sciences a means must be
found to detect and discount bias in the observer himself,
even though this lead him far from the comfortable road
of his preconceived notions.

Let me develop these points a little more fully, one by
one. In the first place, one and the same genetic outfit
will give different effects in different environments. This
is so elementary and fundamental a fact that it has often
been neglected, by the geneticist as well as the eugenist.
In the early literature of modern genetics, you will often
find references to the inheritance of such and such char-
acters. But characters are not and cannot be inherited,
in the sense in which inheritance is used by the geneticist.
What are inherited are genes, factors, genetic outfit. Any
character whatsoever can only be a resultant between
genes and environment. A given character expresses the
interaction between a particular set of genes and a par-
ticular set of environmental conditions. Thus at the out-
set we see that the old question, whether nature or nurture
is the more important, is meaningless. It is like the
question ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ in con-
veying implications which do not correspond with reality.
In general, neither nature nor nurture can be more im-
portant, because they are both essential.

You will note that I say ‘in general/ In particular
cases, one or the other may be more important. Do not
let us forget that all genetics depends on a study of differ-
ences. We take two individuals and strains, and ask what
is the cause of the difference between them. By adjusting

4 *

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

the conditions of our experiment, we find that this is due
either to a difference in their environment or to a differ-
ence in their inherited constitution (or, often, to a differ-
ence in both). We then proceed further and find out, say,
that the genetic difference is due primarily to a difference
in a single gene. Let us suppose that the difference was
one between red and white flowers in a plant. Then we
say, if the white-flowered variety is the aberrant one, that
we have discovered 1 a gene for white flower-colour/ But
this is a shorthand notation. Scientifically, we have dis-
covered that the main cause of the difference in flower-
colour is a difference in the nature of one unit-section of
the chromosome outfit. That is why certain authors tried
at one time to substitute the term differential for gene .

This rather tedious argument has two corollaries of
immediate eugenic importance. The first is this. The
more similar are the environments of two human samples,
the more likely are the observable differences between the
samples to be inheritable. The opposite is also true in
theory, that the more similar are their genetic constitutions,
the more likely are any differences to be environmental and
non-inheritable ; but in view of our ignorance of the precise
genetic constitution of human populations, this has little
applicability save in special cases like that of identical twins.

When on the other hand there are obvious differences
in environment between two groups, there is a strong pre-
sumption that many of the differences between them will
turn out to be mere modifications, which would disappear
if the environmental conditions were equalized. This is
not, of course, to say that the groups will not differ gene-
tically also : merely that the observed differences in char-
acters are not likely to be wholly inherited.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Genetics can provide interesting examples in which
certain conditions of environment may wholly mask the
effect of a gene. The classical case is that of Primula
sinensis . In this plant there is a white-flowered variety
and a red-flowered variety, which differ in regard to a
single Mendelian gene. The white remains white at all
temperatures; but the red variety when raised at a high
temperature produces white flowers. A hot-house will
thus entirely mask the perfectly real genetic difference
between the two.

Even more significant for our purpose is the case of
the mutant of the fruit-fly Drosophila known as abnormal
abdomen , which depends on a single recessive gene. Flies
characteristic of this strain show a bloated and rather
abnormal-looking abdomen, with an extremely poor and
irregular development of the normal pattern of black
bands. However, all gradations from this to normal
appearance are found. Analysis has shown that in
moist conditions the character manifests itself fully,
while in very dry conditions it does not show at all,
and the flies resemble the normal wild type. Environ-
ment may thus wholly mask the effect of a pathological
gene.

These cases introduce us to the further principle, some-
what paradoxical at first sight, that equalizing the en-
vironment may either increase or decrease the amount of
visible variation in a group. In a universe containing
both dry and moist conditions, a mixture of wild-type and
abnormal-abdomen strains of fruit-fly would show a cer-
tain range of variation. Equalize the environment by
making the universe wholly dry, and the population be-
comes uniform: but equalize it by making the universe

4 - 4 -

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

wholly mois^ and the variability is increased. Hogben
has drawn attention to the importance of this point . 1

In various biometric studies, it has been shown that
unfavourable conditions tend to increase the degree of
observed variation. But the attempt to erect this into a
general principle cannot be correct, since the opposite
may in other cases hold good. This is so, for instance,
in our fruit-fly example — moist conditions, being associ-
ated with abundance and availability of food, are favour-
able; yet they here increase variability. A human
example of the same sort, also cited by Hogben , 2 concerns
education. ‘The effect of extending to all classes of
society the educational opportunities available to a small
section of it would presumably be that of increasing
variability with respect to educational attainment. The
effect of depriving the more favoured oi their special ad-
vantage would be to diminish variability in educational
attainments.’ Either policy would result in an equaliza-
tion of environment; but equalizing it by making it more
favourable would bring out genetic differences more fully,
while the reverse process would mask them.

However, whether equalizing the environment will in
this or that case increase or decrease variability, what
differences then remain must be genetic in their origin.
Thus without either equalizing or discounting the effect
of environment, we cannot be sure what differences be-
tween groups are due to inheritance.

This point is of extreme importance in eugenics. For
instance, it is well known that members of different social
classes differ in their average of stature, physique and
intelligence — all of them characters of the greatest evolu-
1 Hogben, 1933, P- “ 5* 8 °P- cit "> P- 1 1 5-

4 i

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

tionary importance, I take one or two examples from
Carr-Saunders. 1 In a sample of fourteen-year-old Liver-
pool schoolboys, the boys from a secondary school were
on the average no less than inches (over io per cent.)
taller than those from a council school in a poor neigh-
bourhood; and differences in weight were equally marked.
In a similar investigation in London, the ‘mental age’ (as
determined by intelligence tests) of boys from a superior
school was far above that of boys from a school in a poor
neighbourhood. Twelve-year-olds from the superior
school had a mental age nearly a year above their real age,
while those from the poor school were a whole year behind
their real age — a difference of 1 5 per cent.

Such differences are usually cited by eugenists as proof
of a real and considerable difference in genetic qualities.
For instance, Professor Carr-Saunders, after quoting these
facts, concluded that ‘so far as persons in this country are
concerned, the mental differences which we observe, after
stripping off the obvious acquirements in the form of
knowledge of facts, habits, customs, manners, are due
only in very small part to differences in the physical en-
vironment, and in a varying though never to a large
degree to differences in the social environment, and for
the greater part to inherited differences.' And he draws
the same general conclusion with regard to the physical
differences. Yet in the few years since Professor Carr-
Saunders’ book was written, this conclusion has become
extremely unlikely. For recent work has shown that vita-
mins and other accessory food-factors have physical and
mental effects far transcending what we originally thought
possible.

1 Carr-Saunders, 1926, pp. 97, 105, 126.

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

In the early years of vitamin research, attention was
concentrated upon the definitely pathological states result-
ing from total or almost total deprivation. During the
last ten years, it has been shown that moderate insuffi-
ciency of these accessory food-factors will result in retarda-
tion of growth, stunting, lack of physical and mental
energy, and reduced resistance to infectious disease. Even
boys who by all ordinary canons were regarded as in fine
health and well above the average in physique were shown
to benefit both in growth and in energy from the addition
of extra milk to their diet. Sir John Orr has shown that
the diet actually consumed by the poorer classes in Aber-
deen, when given in unlimited quantities to rats, results
in poor physique, small litters, low expectation of life,
and proneness to numerous diseases, while the same diet
with the addition of various vitamins and mineral salts
kept the animals in tip-top condition . 1

In the face of such facts, it is no longer legitimate to
attribute the observed differences in physique and intelli-
gence between social classes mainly to genetic factors.
Genetic differences may of course exist; but the strong
probability is that most of the differences are dependent
on differences in nutrition. Further, the defective .nutri-
tion of the poorer classes is in part due to ignorance, but
in a large measure to mere poverty. Until we equalize
nutrition, or at least nutritional opportunity, we have no
scientific or other right to assert the constitutional inferi-
ority of any groups or classes because they are inferior in
visible characters.

The extreme importance of applying accurate methods
to the problem is shown by the results of recent investiga-
1 Cited in Orr, 1936.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

tions on twins. As is well known, twins may be identical
or monozygotic, always of the same sex and both derived
from the same fertilized egg; or they may be fraternal
or dizygotic, either of like or unlike sex, and derived from
two separate eggs. The former will have identical heredi-
tary outfits, the latter will have hereditary outfits as differ-
ent as those of members of the same family born at
different times.

Yet it is true that in regard to intelligence tests, fra-
ternal twins of like sex, though as we would expect they
show considerably less resemblance than identical twins,
are more alike than pairs of brothers or pairs of sisters
born at different times. The additional similarity of their
environment, due to their developing pre-natally and post-
natally in more similar conditions, has assimilated them.

Writing of these results, Hogben 1 says that ‘the ambi-
guity of the concept of causation’ inherent in classical
biometrical method has ‘completely obscured the basic
relativity of nature and nurture.’ The difficulties in-
herent in multiple causation are here pithily summed up,
and attention also drawn to the practical impossibility of
comparing results obtained on material from different
environments, and drawing genetic conclusions on their
face value.

The same is true of racial differences. It seems clear
that the very idea of race as applied to man is a misnomer
under present conditions. Professor Gates has indeed
recently asserted 2 that the major races (colour varieties)
of man should be regarded as true species. This appears
to me to be a grave error, arising from a failure to recog-
nize the biological peculiarities of the human species, as
1 Op, tit p. 95. 8 Gates, 1934.

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

a species. These are due to man’s mobility and his tradi-
tion, and result in a unique degree of variability combined
with a failure of the usual tendencies to speciation: the
incipient species are brought together again by migration
and mingled by inter-crossing before any mutual in-
fertility has been established.

While, however, modern genetics has shown that the
term race only has meaning as a description of somewhat
hypothetical past entities or as a goal for even more
hypothetical future ideals , 1 yet it is of course clear that
different ethnic groups (to use the most general and non-
committal phrase) differ in genetic characters. Ethnic
groups obviously differ in regard to the mean values, and
also the range and type of variability, of physical characters
such as stature, skin-colour, head- and nose-form, etc.:
and these differences are obviously in the main genetic.
There is every reason to believe that they will also be
proved to differ genetically in intellectual and emotional
characters, both quantitatively and qualitatively. But —
and this cannot be too strongly emphasized — we at present
have on this point no evidence whatever which can claim
to be called scientific. Different ethnic groups have
different languages and cultures; and the effects of the
cultural environment are so powerful as to override and
mask any genetic effects.

Most so-called racial traits are in point of fact national
traits; and being so, they have no genetic or eugenic
significance. In illustration we may think of those chief
contributors to our own ancestry, the ancient Britons and
the even less civilized Piets and Scots, of the Roman
Imperial period. They were truly described by the
1 Hurley and Haddon, 1935, especially chapter iv.

C 49

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Romans as barbarians. It is obvious that the difference
between their then barbaric state and our present level of
relative civilization is due entirely or almost entirely to
changes in tradition and culture, material and other.
The genetic basis on which this progress has been erected
was doubtless a good one ; but the only way to see whether
other ethnic groups now in the barbaric stage of culture,
such as the Bantu, differ in their genetical quality is to
give them a similar opportunity. To assert, as is often
done, that the present barbarism of, say, the Bantu is
proof of their genetic inferiority is a gross error of scien-
tific method.

The dangers of pseudo-science in these matters are
being illustrated on a large scale, and with the accom-
paniment of much individual suffering and political
danger, in present-day Germany. The Nazi racial theory
is a mere rationalization of Germanic nationalism on the
one hand and anti-Semitism on the other. The German
nation consists of Mendelian recombinations of every sort
between Alpine, Nordic, and Mediterranean types. The
theory of Nordic supremacy and initiative is not true even
for their own population : 1 it is a myth like any other
myth, on which the Nazis are basing a pseudo-religion of
nationalism.

When we come to the distinction between Aryan and
non- Aryan, the scientific error is magnified; for the very
term Aryan denotes the speakers of a particular type
of language, and can by definition have no genetic sig-
nificance. As Max Muller himself wrote in a belated
recantation : 2 ‘To me an ethnologist who speaks of

1 Huxley and Haddon, op. cit.> chapters iii, vi, vii, ix.

* MttlJer, M., 1 888, p. 245.

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great
a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dic-
tionary or a brachycephalic grammar/

And when it comes to anti-Semitic measures, we must
remember the elementary fact that the Jews are primarily
a pseudo-national group, with a cultural and religious
basis, not primarily an ethnic group with a genetic basis.
Laws that lay down the amount of Jewish 'blood' per-
missible in an 'Aryan' have no quantitative basis and no
real biological meaning.

The alleged inferiority of half-castes between whites
and black or browns is another case in point. If the in-
feriority really exists, it is much more likely to be the
product of the unfavourable social atmosphere in which
they grow up than to any effect (which would be bio-
logically very unusual) of their mixed heredity.

The results of intelligence tests applied to different
ethnic stocks are for the same reason devoid of much
value. Intelligence tests are now very efficient when
applied to groups with similar social environment; they
become progressively less significant as the difference in
social environment increases. Again, we must equalize
environment upwards — here mainly by providing better
educational opportunity — before we can evaluate genetic
difference.

To sum up, in the practical handling of every so-called
racial problem, the error seems invariably to have been
made of confusing genetic with cultural factors. The
former alone could legitimately be called racial : but in-
deed the very term race disintegrates when subjected to
modern genetic analysis. The net results are, firstly that
it would be best to drop the term race from our vocabulary,

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

in spite of their great achievements in pure genetics, from
paying proper attention to eugenics. It now appears,
however, that they are being confronted with problems,
such as the rarity of qualities making for leadership and
the inherent difference between a born leader and an
ordinary man, which are bound to bring them face to face
with eugenics. Here we see a social bias operating in
the first place, to be checked later by the realities emerging
from the social situation.

But while the enormous differences in social environ-
ment between nation and nation, class and class, normally
mask any genetic differences that may exist, and, so far
as visible and effective characters are concerned, largely
override constitutional influences, it is clear that the social
environment itself often exercises a selective influence
which may be of great importance.

This selective influence is of two distinct kinds, which
we may call pre-selective and post-selective. In simplest
terms, pre-selective influences are those which attract
certain types into an environment and discourage others.
Post-selective influences are those which act on the popu-
lation subjected to the environment, favouring certain
evolutionary trends within it at the expense of others.

As a biological example, think of the assemblage of
animals found living in caves. They are characterized
broadly by poor eyesight and reliance on touch; the
extreme types are eyeless, and pale or even colourless.
It seems clear that both pre- and post-selective processes
must have here been at work. Animals with somewhat
poorly developed eyes, which shun the light and normally
live in dark corners, will more frequently find themselves
in caves, and will be likely to survive there better than

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

more active and more ‘normal* types. But once a cave-
population is established, selection will be at work to
encourage the development of tactile and other organs
for use in the dark; it will also cease to operate strongly
or at all on the genes responsible for keeping up full pig-
mentation or perfect eyes, so that these will in many cases
degenerate.

A striking example is that concerning the selective
influence of the environment provided by fields of culti-
vated cereals. As Vavilov has shown , 1 this favoured cer-
tain other plants, which could then flourish as what the
farmer calls weeds, in association with the crop. Among
these weeds were wild grasses related to the cultivated
cereal; and in certain climatic conditions, these weeds
flourished relative to the crop, became the dominant
species, and were then used by man as the basis for a new
crop-plant.

Just as cultivation of one crop-plant here provided the
basis for the later development of another, so the social
environment appropriate to one stage of human culture
gives opportunities for the expression of human traits
which may be destined to become dominant at a later
stage. The eliciting effect of environment is in both cases
essential.

The United States furnishes a classical human example.
Pre-selection was at work on the pioneers. The human
cargo of the Mayflower was certainly not a fandom sample
of the English population. Religious zeal, independence
of character, perhaps a tendency to fanaticism, together
with courage, must have been above the average among
the leaders, and probably in the whole band. The early

1 Va.'ilov, 1926.

THE UNIQUENESS OE MAN

settlers in Virginia and Carolina were pre-selected on
other lines, though some of the characters involved were
the same. After the first settlements were made, further
immigrants until near the end of the nineteenth century
were pre-selected for restlessness, initiative, adventurous-
ness, and the qualities making up the pioneer spirit. The
easily contented, the unadventurous and the timid, were
pre-selected to remain behind. So, too, on the average,
must have been those with artistic, philosophic, literary,
or mathematical gifts. Even if the mean differences be-
tween those who went and those who stayed were not large,
they must have been significant.

Once the immigrants were established in the country,
selection continued. This post-selection, so long as there
was an open physical frontier to the west, and an open
economic frontier in the more settled regions, must on the
whole have encouraged and discouraged the same quali-
ties favoured by pre-selection: in addition, assertiveness
and ambition were encouraged in the acute phase of
‘rugged individualism,' while artistic and literary endow-
ment still were at a discount. Of course the direct mould-
ing effect of the social environment must have acted in the
same sense as its selective effect; so that here again genetic
differences would be masked. Yet on deductive grounds
we can be certain that the selective effect would be at
work, and would produce genetic differences: the only
question is the extent of those differences.

Whenever there are mass-movements of population,
we are sure to find similar selective effects. The differ-
ence between the southern Irish in America and in Ireland
strikes every observer : we can hardly doubt that it is due
in part (though doubtless not entirely) to a sifting of more

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

from less adventurous types. And the same holds true
of the obvious differences between rural and urban popula-
tion in a country like our own. Whatever be the effect
of country life and labour on a man’s temperament, we
can be sure that those who stayed behind were not as a
group genetically identical with those who ventured away
into the new life of the towns.

One of the profoundest selective influences ever brought
to bear on the human population of the globe must have
been that exerted by the invention and spread of agri-
culture, as has been well stressed by Ellsworth Hunt-
ington . 1

A settled agricultural civilization demands qualities in
its members very different from those demanded by a
nomadic or a hunting existence. Agriculture demands
constant application ; the pastoral life is freer, and hunting
demands rather occasional outbursts of maximum energy.
Agriculture demands foresight and the sacrificing of pre-
sent comfort to future benefit; in the more primitive
modes of life, activity springs more immediately from
events. Agriculture demands steady routine in one spot;
the nomad and the hunter can profitably indulge the spirit
of restlessness.

Inevitably, it would seem, where early agricultural
civilizations were growing up, there must have been a
considerable drift of the more restless types out of them
into the nomad and hunting cultures on their borders;
and quite possibly there occurred also a converse move-
ment inwards of more calculating and less restless types.

Further, once the agricultural civilizations were well
established, a dominant class always appeared whose in-
1 Huntington, 1928, chapter xiv.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

tcrests were bound up with the success of the group.
The members of this class therefore were bound to en-
courage submissiveness and industry in the cultivators of
the soil : and although much was in fact accomplished by
purely environmental means, such as religion and law,
there must again have been a selective effect, so that the
level of inherent docility would tend to rise in the peasant
class. Thus in the long run, agriculture must have
markedly increased the selective value of tendencies mak-
ing for the humdrum hard-working human virtues, and
in its secondary effects, as in the birth of the merchant
class and in other ways, have encouraged foresight and
calculation.

Class differences in environment may also be selective.
It seems to be established that the inhabitants of our in-
dustrial towns are on the average smaller and darker than
those of the rural and small-town population . 1 It may
well be that there is a selection against tall and therefore
rapidly-growing types on account of the unfavourable
diet and living conditions of the slum dweller, since slow
growth makes less demands upon a low supply of vita-
mins: and that tall stature is on the whole correlated
with fair complexion. But whatever the cause, the fact
remains, and can only be due to selection of some sort.

A recent report of the Industrial Health Research
Board 2 points out that in the early part of the industrial
era, the demand in factories was for men of good physique
irrespective of build, while appearance or presence counted
for more in shops and offices. This may have laid the
basis for the observed fact that manual workers average

1 Carr-Saunders, 1926, pp. 195-6.

1 Ind. Health Res. Bd. Rept., 1935.

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

shorter than blackcoated workers, but are stronger. It
is quite likely that with the recent introduction of more
automatic machinery, which does not demand strength,
the type of selection will alter, and the factory workers
come to lose their better physique.

The same report mentions that a fairly large sample of
unemployed, contrasted with a large sample of employed
men, were slightly less tall and distinctly less strong.
These were mainly men who would be the first to be
turned off and the last to be taken on, so that selection
seems definitely to have been at work here.

This brings up the large and important question of the
selective effect of the class system as a whole in an in-
dustrial capitalist society. As many writers have pointed
out, in so far as there is any ladder of opportunity by
which men may rise or sink in the social scale, there must
be some selective action. With the passage of time, more
failures will accumulate in the lower strata, while the
upper strata will collect a higher percentage of successful
types.

This would be good eugenically speaking if success
were synonymous with ultimate biological and human
values, or even partially correlated with them; and if the
upper strata were reproducing faster than the lower.
However, we know that reproduction shows the reverse
trend, and it is by no means certain that the equation of
Success with desirable qualities is anything more than a
naive rationalization.

Before, however, we discuss this further, let us look at
some other effects of our pattern of class-system. Once
we begin to reflect, we see that certain qualities are more
favoured, often much more favoured, in some classes than

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

in others. For instance, initiative and independence have
less opportunity among unskilled labourers than else-
where. Inclinations to art, science, or mathematics will
be more favoured in the upper and upper-middle classes
than elsewhere. The result may be truly selective, for
instance by encouraging types genetically above the
average in submissiveness among the proletariat. For the
most part, however, it is likely merely to mask genetic
differences. The fact that an undue proportion of artists,
writers and scientists spring from the upper strata of
society would then not mean that these strata were
proportionately well endowed by heredity — merely that
in the rest of society the Darwins and the Einsteins, like
the Miltons, were mute and inglorious.

Two interesting recent studies by Gray and Moshinsky 1
confirm and extend this conclusion. They show, on the
basis of intelligence tests, and without discounting any of
the superior performance of upper-class children as partly
due to their superior environment, that our present educa-
tional system leaves vast reservoirs of innate intelligence
untrained in the children from lower social strata. Con-
trary to usual belief, only about a third of the children
whose performance is in the top thousandth, come from
the higher social and the professional classes, while wage-
earners contribute 50 per cent, of these children of ‘excep-
tional intelligence.’ Thus our society is not utilizing the
innate intelligence of its members as it might, nor does
the system give adequate opportunity for intelligence to
rise.

Again, highly-strung types are less likely to achieve
success in the lower economic strata, more likely to become
1 Gray and Moshinsky, 1935, a and b .

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

neurotic or insane. People from the lower-middle and
working classes who are apparently mentally deficient or
abnormal have often reached their unfortunate condition
because they have not had either the care or the oppor-
tunities for self-expression which would have been avail-
able in a more generous social environment.

Let us also remember that society as a whole can have
a similar effect. Those same types which in Siberian
tribes would achieve prestige and power as shamans and
medicine-men, or in the medieval world would have be-
come candidates for sainthood, would here and to-day
often find their way into asylums.

This brings us on to a biological point whose import-
ance has not always been realized. It is that selection is
theoretically meaningless and practically without value
except in relation to a particular environment. The prac-
tical implications are both the easiest to grasp and the
more important for our purpose. In breeding domestic
animals, as Hammond of Cambridge has so well stressed , 1
selection and breeding will not produce the desired results
so quickly, and may not produce them at all, if they are
conducted in the unreal environment of an academic
breeding station where optimum conditions are provided.
They should be conducted in an environment similar to
that in which the animals are destined to be used.

An extreme illustration of this is provided by cattle.
In various parts of tropical Africa, the semi-arid bush
country provides but scanty nutriment, and erosion has
led to various mineral deficiencies. The native cattle are
scrubby little beasts, no bigger than ponies, yielding not
more than two gallons of milk a day, and growing so
1 Hammond, 1932 (pp. 251-2), 1935.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

slowly that they do not breed until four to five years old.
Contrasted with cows of a good modern British milking
breed, which are double the size, give up to nine gallons
of milk daily, and breed at two to three years of age, they
are, you would say, very inefficient bits of biological ma-
chinery. Yet if we try to introduce European breeds into
such areas, they are a complete failure. They make de-
mands which are greater than can be met by the environ-
ment. And it is they which suffer ; they become stunted,
rickety or otherwise diseased, and cannot hold their own
in competition with the native breeds. The native stock
will stand a little genetic grading up in present conditions;
but the only chance for radical improvement is to begin
with improvement of the environment — the provision of
mineral fertilizers, salt-licks, watering facilities, and so
on — and then practise genetic selection to keep pace with
the environmental change.

Another example is that of Stapledon’s remarkable
work on moorland grazings . 1 By his methods, rough hill
grazings can be converted into real pastures, capable of
carrying many more sheep, and carrying them all the year
round instead of only in the summer. But this can only
be done by the simultaneous transformation of the en-
vironment and of the herbage stocks. The environmental
transformation consists in breaking up the soil, followed
by the application of certain mineral fertilizers. The
genetic transformation consists first in the destruction of
the original plant covering, brought about by the break-
ing-up of the soil, followed by the sowing of more nutri-
tious pasture grasses and clovers. Furthermore, the new
plants must be of special strains, previously bred and
1 Stapledon, 1935.

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

selected to resist the climatic conditions of the higher alti-
tudes; the ordinary strains that give good lowland pas-
tures will not maintain themselves.

Precisely the same considerations apply to the improve-
ment of man. Our schemes for improving the genetic
qualities of the nation or the species are meaningless
except in relation to some particular environment, present
or future. Our eugenic ideals will be different according
as we relate them to a slave order or a feudal order of
things, a primitive industrial or a leisure order, a this-
worldly or an other-worldly order, a capitalist or a socialist
order, a militarist or a peaceful internationalist order.
Even if we imagine we are working to absolute genetic
standards, we are in reality thinking of them, albeit un-
consciously, in relation to some ideal environment of the
future, or to the needs and realities of the present social
environment, or, very frequently, to our bias and a priori
views about this present environment and how in our
opinion it ought to be changed. If we were really treating
of absolute genetic standards, we should have deserted
reality for a metaphysical vacuum, and our reasoning and
deductions would have even less value than a discussion
of, say, eugenics in heaven. (Even in this latter case, be
it noted, the discussion would inevitably be related to the
environment which we supposed was awaiting us in the
next world 1)

Now all such unconscious thinking is inevitably ir-
rational or at best non-rational : if it had been submitted
to the light of reason, it would no longer be unconscious.
So that a prime task before eugenists is the reasoned
formulation of their views on the environment to which
their schemes of genetic betterment are to be related.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

There are, it seems to me, three possible courses to be
pursued. Either we may accept as given our present
type of social environment, and adjust our eugenic pro-
gramme to it. In practice we shall of course be forced to
take a dynamic instead of a purely static point of view, and
consider the trends of change within that environment,
while assuming that the social system will not be funda-
mentally altered. Or, going to the opposite extreme, we
may assume an ideal social environment — more scien-
tifically, one which is the optimum we can imagine — and
plan our eugenic measures in relation to that, piously
hoping that in the long run social change will adjust
itself to our ideal or to whatever measure of genetic change
we may have brought about. Or finally we may envisage,
as in Stapledon’s grassland work, a joint attack upon en-
vironment and germ-plasm. Assuming that we have
some measure of control over the social environment, we
shall adjust our genetic programme to that programme
of environmental change which represents, both in direc-
tion and tempo, a happy mean between the ideal and the
immediately practical, between what we should like and
what we are likely to get.

Let us look at these three alternatives and their im-
plications. First, however, it should be pointed out that
they are not wholly alternative to each other. Even if we
take the environment for granted, we must face the fact
of social change and attempt to meet it eugenically; and
in so doing we shall find it difficult to avoid giving some
play to our wishes, fears, and hopes. Even if we assume
an optimum environment, our ideal must be based on our
conscious or unconscious estimate of what developments
are inherently possible to the present system. We shall,

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

in effect, be attempting to forecast social improvement,
and we shall prove, we can be sure, as widely out in our
forecasts as if we were attempting to prophesy the future
of scientific discovery. And the third method, of neces-
sity, must take into account both the hard fact of the pre-
sent and the ideal of wishes and hopes for the future.

None the less, there are real differences between the
three; and we must consider these more in detail.

To accept the continuance of the present type of social
environment as essentially given (whether given in reality
or in our hopes and fears will make no difference to our
eugenic plans) means, I take it, two main things. It means
that we must plan for a capitalist class-system, and for a
nationalist system. We accept the division of society into
economic strata, with large differences in standard of liv-
ing, outlook, and opportunity between the different classes ;
and we accept all the implications of the principle that the
earning of a return on capital is the primary aim and duty
of business and finance, whatever minor modifications and
regulations may be found desirable or opportune. We
accept individualist competition, however much toned
down in practice, as essential. Further, we accept the
division of the world into nationalist states, which, how-
ever their sovereignty and independence of action may
be modified or curtailed by international agreements, will
be competing as well as co-operating with each other, and
must in certain eventualities be prepared to resort to war.

Coming down to results, we accept the economic and
spiritual frustrations of the system also — that is to say, we
accept the necessity of some degree of unemployment, for
without that there can be no approach to a free market for
labour; we accept the continuance of trade cycles of boom

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

and slump, even though they may be toned down in ampli-
tude. We accept the need for restriction of output when-
ever surplus interferes with profit. We accept the exist-
ence of a cheap supply of unskilled and semi-skilled
workers ; we accept the need for man-power in case of war.

If so, then we must plan our eugenic policy along some
such lines as the following:

First comes the prevention of dysgenic effects. The
upper economic classes are presumably slightly better
endowed with ability — at least with ability to succeed in
our social system — yet are not reproducing fast enough to
replace themselves, either absolutely or as a percentage of
the total population. We must therefore try to remedy
this state of affairs, by pious exhortation and appeals to
patriotism, or by the more tangible methods of family
allowances, cheaper education, or income-tax rebates for
children. The lowest strata, allegedly less well-endowed
genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore
birth-control methods must be taught them; they must
not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest
the removal of the last check on natural selection should
make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive;
long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization,
or at least relief should be contingent upon no further
children being brought into the world ; and so on. That
is to say, much of our eugenic programme will be curative
and remedial merely, instead of preventive and construc-
tive.

Then, in systems like the present, man-power is im-
portant, and for man-power, quantity of population above
a certain minimum qualitative standard is as essential as
higher quality; and if the two conflict, quantity supply

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

must not be interfered with. For qualitative change, a
dual standard is indicated — docility and industrious sub-
missiveness in the lower majority; intelligence, leadership
and strength of character in the upper few. Since a high
degree of intellect and imagination, of scientific and artistic
ability and other qualities, cannot be adequately expressed
or utilized, under any system resembling the present, in
the great majority of the lower strata, it is useless to plan
for their genetic increase in these strata. Indeed, it is
more than useless, it is dangerous ; for the frustration of
inherent capacity leads to discontent and revolution in
some men, to neurosis and inefficiency in others. The
case is strictly analogous to that of cattle in Africa; in an
unfavourable environment, too drastic genetic improve-
ment is worse than none.

Next we come to planning for an ideal or optimum en-
vironment. An obvious difficulty here is that the various
optima conceived by different minds, or groups of minds,
will be so different as to be irreconcilable. Putting this
on one side, however, it is I think possible to state the sort
of optimum which would commend itself to the mass of
what we may call ‘men of goodwill/ It would, I take it,
be a social environment which gave the opportunity, first
of work which was not excessive, which was felt to be use-
ful, and whose rewards would provide not only the neces-
sities but a reasonable supply of the comforts and ameni-
ties of life: secondly, of a reasonable amount of leisure:
thirdly, the opportunity to everyone of expressing what-
ever gifts of body and mind they might possess, in ath-
letics or sport; in art, science or literature, passive or
actively enjoyed; in travel or politics, in individual hob-
bies or in social service.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

If so, then we should plan a eugenic programme with
a single and very high standard. We should aim at a high
level of inherent physical fitness, endurance and general
intelligence; and we should encourage the breeding of
special talent of any and every sort, for mathematical as
much as for business success, artistic as much as adminis-
trative. We should realize that, if we succeeded, our
genetic results would over a great range of the population
be out of harmony with their social surroundings, and
would either be wasted or lead to friction and discontent,
or might express themselves in characters such as neurosis
or a sense of maladjustment which would represent a lower
level than that from which we started. For ultimate suc-
cess we should rely on creating a demand for changing the
environment towards our optimum. The supply of gen-
etic types which could only reach proper expression in
such an environment would help to create the demand;
the friction and discontent would add themselves to the
forces of change.

It will, however, by now have become clear that neither
of these approaches is so satisfactory as the third. Indeed,
neither is methodologically sound. If the aim of eugenics
be to control the evolution of the human species and guide
it in a desirable direction, and if the genetic selection
should always be practised in relation to an appropriate
environment, then it is an unscientific and wasteful pro-
cedure not to attempt to control environment at the same
time as genetic quality. Science is simultaneously both
theory and practice, both knowledge and control. For the
applied science of eugenics to neglect the environment is
a source both of confusion and of practical weakness.
I would go further: I would say that we cannot succeed

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

in achieving anything in the nature of adequate positive
eugenics unless we attempt the control of the social en-
vironment simultaneously with the control of the human
germ-plasm, any more than Stapledon could have im-
proved his rough mountain grazings save by a similar
double attack.

Let us then look more in detail into this third or dual
method of approach. It has two facets, theoretical and
practical. On the theoretical side, we shall only progress
in our attempt to disentangle the effects of nature from
those of nurture in so far as we follow the footsteps of the
geneticist and equalize environment. We shall never be
able to do this in the sa me radical way as the pure scientist,
by testing out a whole range of controlled and equalized
environments on selected stocks. We must therefore con-
centrate on producing a single equalized environment;
and this clearly should be one as favourable as possible to
the expression of the genetic qualities that we think desir-
able. Equally clearly, this should include the following
items. A marked raising of the standard of diet for the
great majority of the population, until all should be pro-
vided both with adequate calories and adequate accessory
factors; provision of facilities for healthy exercise and
recreation ; and upward equalization of educational oppor-
tunity. The further we move in this direction, the more
readily shall we be able to distinguish inherent physical
and mental defects from environmental stunting and frus-
tration ; the higher we raise the average, the more certain
shall we be that physical or mental performance above the
average is dependent upon genetic endowment and there-
fore provides the raw material for positive eugenics. Not
only this, but we know from various sources that raising

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

the standard of life among the poorest classes almost in-
variably results in a lowering of their fertility. In so far,
therefore, as differential class-fertility exists, raising the
environmental level will reduce any dysgenic effects which
it may now have.

Returning, however, to the more important aspect of
the eugenic knowledge to be gained by levelling up the
social environment, I anticipate that at the bottom, the
social problem group, though shrinking in size, will be
left, clearly marked out by its inadequate performance in
the new and favourable conditions, as a well-defined target
for measures of negative eugenics such as segregation and
sterilization; and that minor targets of the same nature
will emerge out of the present fog, in the shape of nests
of defective germ-plasm inspissated by assortative mating
and inbreeding, such as have been imaginatively glimpsed
by Lidbetter and others. I farther anticipate that the
professional classes will reveal themselves as a reservoir of
superior germ-plasm, of high average level notably in
regard to intelligence, and therefore will serve as a founda-
tion-stone for experiments in positive eugenics. But I
anticipate that society will tap large resources of high
ability that are at present unutilized, thus facilitating the
social promotion of at least certain fitter elements; and
without social promotion we cannot proceed to reproduc-
tive encouragement. This is the scientific ideal at which
we should aim. Like many other ideals, we shall not
achieve it; but any approach to it will help us towards a
more certain knowledge.

Science, however, is control as well as knowledge; and
new practice may advance theory as much as new theory
lay the basis for practice. This is especially true for the

7 °

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

social sciences, where, as we have seen, rigorously con-
trolled experiment, on the pattern of pure physics or
physiology, is impossible, and problems must frequently
be solved ambulando . We make a partial experiment
which is simultaneously pure and applied science. The
experiment is both an attempt to gain knowledge and an
effort to realize a wish, a desired control. It is planned,
like more crucial experiments in the natural sciences, to
verify deductions from known facts. In so far as the de-
sired end is attained, the deductions are verified and know-
ledge is increased : and even if the control is not attained,
knowledge is increased, though not to the same extent.

This more empirical mode of attack must also be used
in eugenics. We must attempt to control the change of
social environment and at the same time to control the
change of human germ-plasm, along lines which appear
likely to yield tangible and desirable results. It is the
results which interest us. Admirable germ-plasm unable
to realize itself owing to unfavourable conditions does not
interest us: nor do the most alluring social conditions, if
they permit or encourage the deterioration of the germ-
plasm. Thus the two attacks must be planned in relation
to each other, and also in relation to practicability.

When we think along these lines, we shall find, I believe,
that a system such as ours, a competitive and individualist
system based on private capitalism and public nationalism,
is of its nature and essence dysgenic. It is dysgenic both
in the immediate respect of failing to utilize existing re-
servoirs of valuable genes, and also in the long-range tasks
of failing to increase them, failing to trap and encourage
favourable mutations, and failing to eliminate harmful
mutations.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Under our social system, the full stature or physique
of the very large majority of the people is not allowed to
express itself; neither are the full genetic potentialities of
health permitted to appear except in a small fraction of
the whole, with a consequent social waste of energy and
time, not to mention a waste of individual happiness which
is formidable in extent; and finally, innate high ability is
encouraged or utilized only with extreme inadequacy.
For the first two wastes, ignorance is partly responsible,
but in the lower economic strata, poverty is the chief cause.
For the last, our inadequate educational system is chiefly
responsible.

Then R. A. Fisher has brilliantly and devastatingly
shown 1 the relentless way in which such a system as ours
promotes both infertility and certain types of talent, and
in so doing ties together the genetic factors responsible.
In the course of the generations genes making for small
families become increasingly bound up with those making
for social and economic success; and conversely those
making for social and economic failure become bound up
with those making for high reproduction rates. Eugenic-
ally speaking our system is characterized by the social
promotion of infertility and the excess fertility of social
failure.

If this be true, then so long as we cling to a system of
this type, the most we can hope to do is to palliate its
effects as best we may, by extending birth-control facilities
downwards, instituting graded systems of family allow-
ances, providing for sterilization here and financial relief
for children there. But even if we thus reduce the dis-
tortion we cannot hope to change its sign.

1 Fisher, 1930, chapter xi.

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

Then, in so far as our system remains nationalist, the
demand for man-power and quantity will continue to
interfere with the higher aim of quality. Furthermore,
modern war itself is dysgenic. This has often been
pointed out as regards its direct effects. It appears, how-
ever, also to hold for its indirect effects; many among the
more imaginative and sensitive types are to-day restricting
their families, sometimes to zero, because they feel that
they cannot bear to bring children into a world exposed
to such a constant risk of war and chaos.

As eugenists we must therefore aim at transforming
the social system. There may of course be those amongst
our ranks who prefer the not disagreeable role of a Jere-
miah darkly prophesying gloom to settling down at the
more prosaic job of constructive work. But as a body,
we shall wish, I take it, to see at least the possibility of
our dreams coming true.

What sort of practical changes, then, should we as eu-
genists try to encourage in the social and economic sys-
tem ? In the first place — what we have already noted as
desirable on theoretical grounds — the equalizing of en-
vironment in an upward direction. For this, by permitting
of more definite knowledge as to the genetic constitution
of different classes and types, will at once give us more
certainty in any eugenic selection, negative or positive,
upon which we may embark. And secondly, we must aim
at the abandonment of the idea of national sovereign states,
and the subordination of national disputes to international
organization and supernational power.

But we need something more radical than this — we
must try to find a pattern of economic and communal life
which will not be inherently dysgenic; and we must also

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

try to find a pattern of family and reproductive life which
will permit of more rapid and constructive eugenics.

On the first point, it seems clear that the individualist
scramble for social and financial promotion should be
dethroned from its present position as main incentive in
life, and that we must try to raise the power of group-
incentives. Group-incentives are powerful in tribal exist-
ence, and have been powerful in many historical civiliza-
tions, such as the old Japanese. What interests us chiefly,
however, is to find that they have been to a large extent
effective in replacing individualist money incentives, or
at least diminishing their relative social importance, in
several modern States, notably Germany and the U.S.S.R.

It is not for a biologist to discuss the purely social
merits of different political philosophies: but he may be
allowed to point out that not all group-incentives are
equally valuable from the eugenic standpoint. Those of
Nazi Germany, for instance, presuppose an intensification
of nationalist feeling and activity instead of their diminu-
tion : and this, we have concluded, is actually anti-eugenic.
It may of course be urged that it is in its immediate effect
eugenic; and there will be many to uphold the value of
the eugenic measures recently adopted in Germany under
the stimulus of National-Socialist ideas and emotions,
even if some of them be .crude and unscientific. But if in
the long run it leads to over-population and war, it is
essentially dysgenic, and in matters of evolution we must,
I think, take the long view.

Further, if the social environment is such as to give
satisfaction to the possessors of social traits such as altru-
ism, readiness to co-operate, sensitiveness, sympathetic
enthusiasm, and so forth, instead of, as now, putting a

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

premium on many antisocial traits such as egoism, low
cunning, insensitiveness, and ruthless concentration, we
could begin to frame eugenic measures for encouraging
the spread of genes for such social virtues. At the mo-
ment this is hardly possible, for the expression of such
genes is so often inhibited or masked by the effects of the
environment. This is a human illustration of Hammond’s
general principle, that breeding and selection for a given
type can only be efficiently carried out in an environment
favouring the fullest development of the type.

There is no doubt that genetic differences of tempera-
ment, including tendencies to social or antisocial action,
to co-operation or individualism, do exist, nor that they
could be bred for in man as man has bred for tameness
and other temperamental traits in many domestic animals;
and it is extremely important to do so. If we do not,
society will be continuously in danger from the antisocial
tendencies of its members.

Just as the basic structure of our present social system
is essentially dysgenic, so we may say that the genetic
composition of our present population is largely and per-
haps essentially antisocial. Thus both environmentally
and genetically the present state of mankind is unstable,
at war with itself.

Another important point to femember, especially in
these days when the worship of the State is imposing a
mass-production ideal of human nature, is the fact and
the significance of human variability. The variability of
man, due to recombination between divergent types that
have failed to become separated as species, is greater than
that of any wild animal. And the extreme variants thrown
up by the constant operation of this genetic kaleidoscope

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

have proved to be of the utmost importance for the material
and spiritual progress of civilization. Whatever bias or
prejudice may beset the individual eugenist, eugenics as
a whole must certainly make the encouragement of diver-
sity one of its main principles. But here again the en-
vironment comes in. If extreme types are to be produced,
especially gifted for art, science, contemplation, explora-
tion, they must not be wasted. The social system must
provide niches for them.

As a special and important special case of providing for
variability, there are the needs of the educational profes-
sion. At the moment, this social category seems definitely
selective in that it attracts and encourages men and women
of an intellectualist and academic type. This is partly
because there are not sufficient outlets provided elsewhere
in our social system for such types, partly because the
educational profession as at present constituted does not
provide sufficient attraction for contrasted types. This
restriction of type among those responsible for the up-
bringing of the next generation cannot be satisfactory,
and an altered status for the educational profession so
that its genetic basis is broadened is an important task for
social biology, and, since it involves genetics, legitimately
part of the eugenic movement.

Still more important for the comparatively immediate
future is the relation of the dominant group-incentive to
reproductive morality, law, and practice. We all know
that certain schools of Christian thought to-day are op-
posed on grounds of religious principle to birth-control,
that indispensable tool of eugenics as well as of rational
control of population, and even to the very notion of
eugenics itself. But even if this opposition could be over-

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

come, there would remain in this field grave obstacles,
both to the spread of the eugenic idea and to the rate of
its progress in practice. These are the prevailing indi-
vidualist attitude to marriage, and the conception, based
on this and on the long religious tradition of the West,
of the subordination of personal love to procreation. The
two influences together prevent us collectively from grasp-
ing the implications of the recent advances in science and
technique which now make it possible to separate the
individual from the social side of sex and reproduction.
Yet it is precisely and solely this separation that would
make real eugenics practicable, by allowing a rate of pro-
gress yielding tangible encouragement in a reasonable
time, generation by generation.

The recent invention of efficient methods on the one
hand of birth-control and on the other of artificial insemin-
ation have brought man to a stage at which the separation
of sexual and reproductive functions could be used for
eugenic purposes. But it is of real interest to note that
these inventions represent merely the last steps in an evolu-
tionary process which started long before man ever existed.

In lower mammals, the existence of limited breeding
seasons, and, during these, the restriction of mating to
the oestrous phase in the female’s reproductive cycle, do
in fact link sexual behaviour firmly with reproduction.
But in the great primate stock to which we belong, a new
trend early becomes apparent. Breeding seasons are less
definite, and mating may occur at any time during the
female cycle, so that most acts of union are in fact and of
necessity infertile, without reproductive consequences.
This trend becomes more marked as we ascend the evolu-
tionary scale, and culminates in man. In civilized man,

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

the faint traces of a breeding season apparent in certain
primitive ethnic stocks have wholly disappeared, and there
is no greater readiness to mate during the short period
when alone conception is possible than at most other times
of the female cycle . 1

This has already led in point of fact to the widespread
separation of the personal function of sexual union from
its racial consequences, of love from reproduction. It is
true that some persons and bodies on theological or meta-
physical grounds either ostrich-like deny the existence of
this separation, or assert that it ought not to be practised ;
but this does not alter the fact.

The perfection of birth-control technique has made the
separation more effective; and the still more recent tech-
nique of artificial insemination has opened up new horizons,
by making it possible to provide different objects for the
two functions. It is now open to man and woman to con-
summate the sexual function with those they love, but to
fulfil the reproductive function with those whom on per-
haps quite other grounds they admire.

This consequence is the opportunity of eugenics. But
the opportunity cannot yet be grasped. It is first neces-
sary to overcome the bitter opposition to it on dogmatic
theological and moral grounds, and the widespread
popular shrinking from it, based on vague but powerful
feelings, on the ground that it is unnatural.

We need a new attitude to these problems, an attitude
which for want of another term we may still call religious.
We need to replace the present attitude fostered by estab-
lished religions by a new but equally potent attitude.

As regards the sense of salvation, we need to substitute
1 Zuckerman, 1932, p. 73/.

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

social salvation for individual salvation; and as regards
the need of some escape-mechanism from the pressure of
present difficulty, we need to substitute the real possi-
bility of evolutionary progress for other-worldly phan-
tasies. Once this possibility of true human progress,
both social and genetic, is generally apprehended, and the
social system remodelled so that individual success does
not conflict with communal welfare, and self-expression
and personal satisfaction can be largely achieved in serving
society, then sex and reproduction can take their due
places as individual and social functions respectively.
Gone will be many of the conflicts inherent in present-day
marriage: any sacrifice involved in parenthood will be
made on the altar of the race, and in the knowledge that
it will be acceptable. Those who wish to pursue further
the possibilities of such a step should consult Mr Brewer’s
recent article on Eutelegenesis 1 and Professor Muller’s
book Out of the Night? Here it must suffice to point out
that unless we alter the social framework of law and ideas
so as to make possible the divorce between sex and repro-
duction, or if you prefer it between the individual and the
social sides of our sexual functions, our efforts at evolu-
tionary improvement will remain mere tinkering, no more
deserving the proud title of eugenics than does the mend-
ing of saucepans deserve to be called engineering.

That consummation, you will perhaps say, is impossibly
remote from our imperfect present, hardly to be affected
by any of our little strivings to-day. That may be so : but
I am not so sure. Let us remember that modern science
is a mere three centuries old : yet it has already achieved
changes in outlook that are of comparable magnitude.

1 Brewer, H., 1935. 2 Muller, H. J., 1935.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Biological science is only now attaining its maturity, and
the social sciences are mere infants. Looked at in the
long perspective of evolution, the present phase of human
activity is one of transition between that of acceptance and
that of control of destiny, between magic and science,
between unconsciously-nurtured phantasy and consciously-
faced reason. It is, in the sense of the word used in
physics, a critical phase : and being so, it cannot be either
stable or long-enduring.

It is to my mind not only permissible but highly desir-
able to look far ahead. Otherwise we are in danger of
mistaking for our eugenic ideal a mere glorification of our
prejudices and our subjective wish-fulfilments. It is not
eugenics but left-wing politics if we merely talk of favour-
ing the survival and reproduction of the proletariat at the
expense of the bourgeoisie. It is not eugenics but right-
wing politics if we merely talk of favouring the breeding
of the upper classes of our present social system at the
expense of the lower. It is not eugenics but nationalist
and imperialist politics if we speak in such terms as sub-
ject races or miscegenation. Our conclusions in any
particular case may be on balance eugenically correct
(though the correlation between broad sociaj or ethnic
divisions and genetic values can never be high), yet they
will not be based primarily upon eugenic considerations,
but upon social or national bias. The public-school ideal,
or that of the working-class movement, or that of colonial
imperialism, may be good ideals ; but they are not eugenic
ideals.

Before concluding, I should like to draw attention to
one eugenically important consequence of recent progress
in pure genetics. In all organisms so far investigated,

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

ieleterious mutations far outnumber useful ones. There
s an inherent tendency for the hereditary constitution to
iegrade itself. That man shares this tendency we can be
>ure, not only from analogy but on the all-too-obvious evi-
dence provided by the high incidence in ‘civilized’ popula-
:ions of defects, both mental and physical, of genetic origin.

In wild animals and plants, this tendency is either re-
versed or at least held in check by the operation of natural
selection, which here again proves itself to be, in R. A.
Fisher’s words, a mechanism capable of generating high
degrees of improbability. In domestic animals and plants,
the same result is achieved by our artificial selection. But
in civilized human communities of our present type, the
elimination of defect by natural selection is largely (though
of course by no means wholly) rendered inoperative by
medicine, charity, and the social services; while, as we
have seen, there is no selection encouraging favourable
variations. The net result is that many deleterious muta-
tions can and do survive, and the tendency to degradation
of the germ-plasm can manifest itself.

To-day, thanks to the last fifteen years’ work in pure
science, we can be sure of this alarming fact, whereas pre-
viously it was only a vague surmise . 1 Humanity will
gradually destroy itself from within, will decay in its very
core and essence, if this slow but relentless process is not
checked. Here again, dealing with defectives in the
present system can be at best a palliative. We must be
able to pick out the genetically inferior stocks with more
certainty, and we must set in motion counter-forces mak-
ing for faster reproduction of superior stocks, if we are
to reverse or even arrest the trend. And neither of these,
1 Muller, H. J., 1935.

D 81

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

It is to my mind not only permissible but highly desir-
able to look far ahead. Otherwise we are in danger of
mistaking for our eugenic ideal a mere glorification of our
prejudices and our subjective wish-fulfilments. It is not
eugenics but left-wing politics if we merely talk of favour-
ing the survival and reproduction of the proletariat at the
expense of the bourgeoisie. It is not eugenics but right-
wing politics if we merely talk of favouring the breeding
of the upper classes of our present social system at the
expense of the lower. It is not eugenics but nationalist
and imperialist politics if we speak in such terms as sub-
ject races or miscegenation. Our conclusions in any
particular case way be on balance eugenically correct
(though the correlation between broad sociaj or ethnic
divisions and genetic values can never be high), yet they
will not be based primarily upon eugenic considerations,
but upon social or national bias. The public-school ideal,
or that of the working-class movement, or that of colonial
imperialism, may be good ideals ; but they are not eugenic
ideals.

Before concluding, I should like to draw attention to
one eugenically important consequence of recent progress
in pure genetics. In all organisms so far investigated,

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

eleterious mutations far outnumber useful ones. There
> an inherent tendency for the hereditary constitution to
egrade itself. That man shares this tendency we can be
are, not only from analogy but on the all-too-obvious evi-
ence provided by the high incidence in 4 civilized ’ popula-
ons of defects, both mental and physical, of genetic origin.

In wild animals and plants, this tendency is either re-
ersed or at least held in check by the operation of natural
election, which here again proves itself to be, in R. A.
'isher’s words, a mechanism capable of generating high
egrees of improbability. In domestic animals and plants,
hie same result is achieved by our artificial selection. But
i civilized human communities of our present type, the
limination of defect by natural selection is largely (though
f course by no means wholly) rendered inoperative by
aedicine, charity, and the social services; while, as we
Lave seen, there is no selection encouraging favourable
ariations. The net result is that many deleterious muta-
ions can and do survive, and the tendency to degradation
>f the germ-plasm can manifest itself.

To-day, thanks to the last fifteen years’ work in pure
cience, we can be sure of this alarming fact, whereas pre-
viously it was only a vague surmise . 1 Humanity will
gradually destroy itself from within, will decay in its very
:ore and essence, if this slow but relentless process is not
hecked. Here again, dealing with defectives in the
>resent system can be at best a palliative. We must be
.ble to pick out the genetically inferior stocks with more
ertainty, and we must set in motion counter-forces mak-
ng for faster reproduction of superior stocks, if we are
o reverse or even arrest the trend. And neither of these,
1 Muller, H.J., 1935.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

as we have seen, is possible without an alteration of social
system.

Whether or not I have been asking you to accompany
me too far into the visionary future, I will end this essay
with a very concrete suggestion for the present, backed
by a warning from the immediate past.

Twenty-five years ago, when I had just taken my degree,
the field of heredity was still a battle-field. The Mendel-
ians and the Biometricians were disputing for its posses-
sion, and in the heat of the struggle little mercy was shown
by either side to the other. In the last dozen years or so,
however, the apparent conflict of principle has been shown
not to exist, and now, thanks to the work of such men as
R. A. Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane, we realize that the two
methods of approach are complementary, and that certain
important problems can only be solved by their simul-
taneous employment.

The present position of eugenists appears to me to be
closely parallel with the position of the Mendelians a
quarter of a century ago. They find themselves in ap-
parent conflict with the environmentalists and the pro-
tagonists of social reform. Speaking broadly, the field
of human improvement is a battle-field between Eugenists
and Sociologists, and the battle is often as violent as that
between the Mendelians and Biometricians — or between
Swift’s Big-endians and Little-endians. In my opinion,
it is also as unreal and useless. We eugenists must no
longer think of the social environment only in its possible
dysgenic or non-eugenic effects, but must study it as an
indispensable ally. Changes in social environment are
needed both for the adequate expression of eugenic pro-
gress, and as a means for its realization.

EUGENICS AND SOCIETY

The next step for eugenics is, as I urged at the begin-
ning of this essay, a methodological one. We eugenists
must familiarize ourselves with the outlook and the con-
cepts of sociology, with the technique and practice of
social reform; for they are an indispensable part of the
machinery we need to realize our aims.

REFERENCES

Blakeslee, A. F., and Fox, A. L. 1932. ‘Our different taste
worlds.’ J. Hered ., 23.

Brewer, Herbert. 1935. ‘Eutelegenesis,’ Eugenics Review ,
27, 121.

Carr-Saunders, A. M. 1926. Eugenics. Home University
Library. Williams & Norgate. London.

Fisher, R. A. 1930. The Genetical Basis of Natural Selection.
Clarendon Press. Oxford.

Gates, R. R. 1934. ‘Racial and Social Problems in the Light
of Heredity,’ Population , / (2).

Gray, J. L., and Moshinsky, P. 1935. (a) ‘ Ability and Oppor-
tunity in English Education,’ Sociological Review , 27 (2), 1935.
(b) ‘Ability and Educational Opportunity in Relation to Parental
Occupation,’ Sociological Review , 27 (3), 1935.

Hammond, J. 1932. Growth and Development of Mutton
Qualities in the Sheep. Oliver & Boyd. Edinburgh.

Hammond, J. 1935. ‘Inheritance of Productivity in Farm
Livestock. I. Meat,’ Empire Jour. Exper. Agric. y ^ y 1.

Hogben, L. T. 1 933 - Nature and Nurture. Williams &c
Norgate. London.

Huxley, J. S., and Haddon, A. C. 1935 * ^ e Europeans.

Cape. London.

Huntington, E. 1928. The Human Habitat. Chapman &
Hall. London.

Industrial Health Research Board, Fifteenth Annual Report ,
1935. H.M. Stationery Office. London.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Muller, H. J. 1935. Out of the Night . Vanguard Press.
New York.

M tiller, Max. 1888. Biographies of Words and the Home of
the Ary as. Longmans. London.

Orr, Sir J. B. 1936. Food, Health and Income. Macmillan.
London.

Stapledon, R. G. 1935. The Land Now and To-morrow .
Faber & Faber. London.

Vavilov, N. I. 1926. Bull. Appl. Bot Leningrad , 16, 139.
Zuckerman, S. 1932. The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes.
Kegan Paul. London.

Ill

CLIMATE AND HUMAN HISTORY

O f late years a determined attempt has been made to
rewrite history in economic terms. But this does not
go deep enough. Man's thought and social life are built
on his economic life; but this, in its turn, rests on bio-
logical foundations. Climate and geology between them
decide where the raw materials of human industry are to
be found, where manufactures can be established; and
climate decides where the main springs of human energy
shall be released. Changes of climate cause migrations,
and migrations bring about not only wars, but the fertiliz-
ing intermingling of ideas necessary for rapid advance in
civilization.

Disease and hygiene play as important a part; half the
population of the world is permanently below par on
account of animal parasites such as the hookworm and the
microscopic malaria germ; and disease may bring about
the rise or fall of empires. Nor has selection ever ceased
its rigorous activity. To pass from one mode of life to
another is not a simple affair for a people; a settled agri-
cultural life demands a very different temperament from
hunting, and the hereditary make-up of the race must be
altered if a people is to pass successfully from one to the
other. Moit migrations, too, are selective; to take but
one example, the Puritans who first colonized Massa-
chusetts did not bring with them a random sample of the
genes responsible for the qualities of the English people.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

But selection is altered and reduced. The better care of
the young and the elaboration of social life allow all sorts
of variations, which otherwise would be snuffed out, to
survive and often to play an important part in progress.
Knowledge for knowledge’s sake is out of place in a
primitive hunting tribe.

When the world’s climatic belts are sharply marked (as
they are to-day, in contrast to epochs like the late Eocene,
when climate was much more uniform), the temperate
zones, flanked poleward by the subarctic and the arctic,
are separated from the tropics by two dry belts, along
which all the world’s great deserts are strung. The only
zones where vegetation is abundant and man can easily
flourish are the temperate and the tropical. But the tem-
perate has another advantage. It contains the belt of
cyclonic storms — in other words, of rapid and frequent
changes of weather. And this type of climate, as Ells-
worth Huntington has shown, is the one most stimulating
to human energy and achievement.

We are still so ignorant of the earliest steps in the evolu-
tion of man from his simian ancestors that ideas as to the
influence of climate on this phase of his history are highly
speculative. It can scarcely be doubted, however, that the
progressive desiccation of the world that took place in the
late Cenozoic Epoch helped to drive our ancestors down
from the trees and out into the plains. We know that the
Himalayas were elevated at this time; and it has been
plausibly suggested that man originated to the north of
them. For, as the land here grew drier, the forests shrank
southward, where they were met by the impassable moun-
tain barrier, and disappeared from Central Asia. Their
anthropoid inhabitants were therefore forced either to dis-

CLIMATE AND HUMAN HISTORY

appear too or to become adapted to the new conditions,
growing more terrestrial and more carnivorous. However
this may be, men of a sort were undoubtedly in existence
before the beginning of the Ice Age, over half a million
years ago. But until we shall have found more traces of
Eolithic and Lower Paleolithic man in other parts of the
world than Europe (which was doubtless a mere outlier of
human development) we shall not be able to piece together
the fascinating story of the influence of the different ad-
vances and retreats of the ice, or the slow progress of Old
Stone Age man. Pekin man and recent discoveries irl
Africa show how complex the picture was.

When the ice of the glacial period was still in the early
stages of its last retreat, the storm belt must have lain over
North Africa, making what is now the Sahara green and
fertile. It was through Africa, and perhaps eventually
from southern Asia, that Europe received its modern men,
perhaps about 20,000 b.c. (Until about 4000 b.c. our
dating must be regarded as provisional only; for the most
part the chronology of Peake and Fleure, in their series,
The Corridors of Time , is here followed.)

Gradually, as the ice withdrew northward, the belts of
climate followed it up. The Sahara began to come within
the limits of the dry belt. To-day, in certain parts of the
Sahara, crocodiles and certain fresh-water fish exist in
scattered oases. But these oases are isolated, without
possible connections with other bodies of water. The
water beasts that inhabit them are living in the sparse rem-
nants of the well-watered, and indeed probably swampy,
expanse of verdure that once spread over the Great Desert.
This drying of the Sahara must have sent wave after wave of
migrating men out of it, both northward and southward.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Meanwhile the zone of greatest fertility and greatest
human vigour came to lie along the Mediterranean, through
Mesopotamia and across to Turkestan. This again set
great movements afoot. The Magdalenians, last of the
Old Stone Age men, pushed northward with the forests in
the wake of the retreating game of the treeless plains; till
eventually, hemmed in between forest and sea, they were
forced to lead a wretched existence as gatherers of shellfish
and berries on the Baltic coast. The descendants of the
other Stone Age peoples, who had remained behind in
North Africa and Spain, evolved what is called the Caspian
Culture ; later they too trekked northward and eventually
fetched up in western Asia.

As the open plains shrank before the advance of the
forests, big game grew scarce, and men turned to other
sources of food. They became food- gatherers as well as
hunters, eating nuts and berries and wild grain. This
must have seemed a misfortune to those early hunters.
But it was the spur to progress, for from food-gathering to
food-growing, to real agriculture, was a natural step. It
seems to have been somewhere before 5000 b.c., in the
Near East, that the art of agriculture was discovered.
Legend has it that Isis, the great goddess, found corn on
Mount Hermon in Syria, and gave it to her sacred son.
The legend may well contain two kernels of truth. It is
probable that women rather than men first hit on the idea
of planting grain, for the men’s work would still be afield,
hunting; and it is probable- that it was discovered some-
where in Syria or its near neighbourhood. By 5000 b.c.
grain-growing had spread round from Palestine to Meso-

CLIMATE AND HUMAN HISTORY

potamia, and permanent settlements had come into being.
The polish gained by stone implements used for hoeing
probably gave men the idea of deliberately polishing their
tools; if so, agriculture was the cause of the change to the
Neolithic Culture. In any case, agriculture and polished
neolithic stone implements appear at about the same time.

The arts of pottery and weaving were in all probability
discovered about the same time as that of grain- growing,
and the first permanent houses were built. Domestic
animals followed soon after; domestication seems first to
have been learned by hunters, but the art spread rapidly
and was extended and improved by the settled agricultur-
ists. Metal-working was not long behind, though for
centuries only copper and gold were employed — copper
for use and gold solely for ornament.

The glacial period did not die steadily away; it left the
earth in a series of spasms or oscillations, a time of rapid
retreat being followed by a standstill or even an advance of
the ice, brought about, it would seem, by an elevation of
the land. For a century or so about 4500 b.c., there was
such an elevation. This seems to have had two interesting
consequences. For one thing, the increased snowfall
round the Mesopotamian basin gave rise to such violent
spring floods, year after year, that some towns were aban-
doned, and the memory of the disastrous time has been
preserved, it seems, in the story of Noah's flood and the
corresponding Mesopotamian legends. But more im-
portant was its effect on Egypt. In the centuries before
this time, the Nile Valley seems to have been marshy and
largely uninhabitable; the elevation must have drained it.
And the long ribbon of marvellously fertile land thus pro-
vided for the use of man tempted in the agriculturists of

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

neighbouring countries. This, it appears, was the real
beginning of the civilization of Egypt; but, once started
on its career, its geographical position was such that it
soon outstripped its rivals.

Thus, largely as a result of the pressure of changing
climate on early man, hunting gave place to agriculture.
Well before 4000 b.c. what we may call the Archaic Civil-
ization, based on corn and a settled life, — with houses and
pottery, woven fabrics and metal work, in addition, — was
fully established, from Egypt round by Syria to the Tigris
and Euphrates. This corner of the globe was predestined
to be the cradle of the modern world — by its climate, by
its great rivers, by the fact of its being the original home
of wheat, by its being a natural meeting-place for different
streams of culture brought by different migrations of men,
east and west as well as north and south.

Before 4000 b.c. there had been added to the achieve-
ments of settled man the art of writing, the framing of a
calendar, irrigation, the wheel, and the making of fer-
mented liquor. Through the whole of the next millen-
nium this remarkable civilization was free to develop its
own potentialities. It was a time of depression of land, a
moist time over the steppes and the Arabian peninsula,
and so a time when the nomad inhabitants of these regions
could thrive and multiply in their own homes, not driven
by drought to irrupt into the lands of their richer neigh-
bours. To what height the Mesopotamian civilization
reached is attested by the marvellous workmanship of the
objects from Ur of the Chaldees, which date from about
3500 b.c. The organization of the State under a priest-
king, even the welding of empires a million strong, stone
architecture, the arch, written codes of law, sea-going

CLIMATE AND HUMAN HISTORY

ships — these were some of the achievements of this
millennium.

But the available land in this corner of the world was
being filled up by the natural increase of population; and
this filling up coincided with a new elevation of the land
and a new period of drought. Between them, the two
caused such a movement in the world of man that the
Archaic Culture, though made to totter in its original
home, was forced to spread its influence far and wide over
Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Ill

The new millennium dawned favourably enough.
Egyptian civilization, borne along on its own momentum,
reached new successes. Beautiful temples of stone, and
the pyramids, with their astounding exactitude and col-
ossal size, date from its earliest centuries. Mathematics
and astronomy take their rise ; the State is run by a regular
bureaucracy. A little later, in Mesopotamia, King Sargon
comes on the scene, the first of the great conquerors to
build an empire with armies.

For armies were another new invention. The primitive
hunters had doubtless fought, but it had probably never
been organized fighting; and the early food-gatherers and
cultivators seem to have been peaceable on the whole.
There was assuredly never any Golden Age of Peace, as
Perry and other enthusiasts imagine, but the early ages of
human life were probably on the whole peaceful, because
deliberate and organized warfare was not necessary and
did not pay. War began as settled man quarrelled over his
property and his privileges. The idea of war soon spread
to the less civilized peoples who fringed the settled lands;

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

and it became possible for these peoples to practise war
efficiently because they had passed from the state of
hunters to that of nomads, disciplined herdsmen, and
horsemen. The horse must have been domesticated on
the steppes somewhere before 3000 b.c. A little later,
drought began, and the nomads, lacking food at home,
poured down on the settled lands with their horses. These
were as terrible an innovation in warfare then as were the
tanks in the wars of our own day some 4500 years later;
and both Egypt and Mesopotamia were overrun and their
civilization put in peril.

Meanwhile the pressure of population, of climatic
changes, of invasions in the rear, forced the grain-growers
out in all directions. Not till about 3000 b.c. did any
settle on the continent of Europe; but well before the
close of the succeeding millennium they had spread over
its greater part, to Thrace, to Germany, to Belgium, to
France. And the push was felt by sea as well as by land.
The whole Mediterranean became a great trade-lake, and
the Aigean sailors had reached the Atlantic at latest by
2200 b.c. At the same time a great wave of migration
spread eastward, and a new culture reached northern
India and right across to China, which thus seems to have
received the first rude germs of her culture. It is possible
that the American continent also received its first dose of
civilization during this period, by a migration over the
land-bridge where now are the Behring Straits.

The maritime expansion continued into the next millen-
nium, and so did the dry climate, which was especially
marked in north-western Europe. Sea trade reached Ire-
land and Scandinavia. Ireland attained a very high level
of culture, which was probably only made possible by this

CLIMATE AND HUMAN HISTORY

dry and bracing climate, before the excessive moisture of
later centuries damped the energies of her inhabitants.

About 1 800 b . c . there was again a change. The clim-
ate became gradually moister and cooler. From about
1200 b . c . to a.d. 200 there was a new cycle of wet and
cold, reaching its maximum about 400 b . c . and then
gradually falling off, to pass over to drought about a.d.
500. The belt of storm-tracks again passed through the
Mediterranean, giving opportunity for the rise of Baby-
lonia and Assyria, Canaan and Phoenicia, of latter-day
Crete and Egypt, of Mycenae and Troy, Greece, Carthage,
and Rome. North Africa was then the granary of the
world. The Mediterranean was the focus of human
energy, and, since the nomads could live comfortably on
their steppes while the wet time continued, could pursue
its destiny little troubled by barbarian invasions.

But the change of climate was disastrous to the northern
lands. On them, cold and wet descended; the peat bogs
spread; the forests died off as the swampy moors ex-
tended. There was a marked falling off of culture in Ire-
land and Scandinavia ; and the worst cold spell, in the fifth
and fourth centuries b.c., has apparently left its permanent
trace in the northern legend of the Twilight of the Gods,
which pictures a disastrous world bound in the grip of
snow and ice.

After this, the classical Mediterranean civilization be-
gan to fail. Jones, some twenty-five years ago, suggested
in a remarkable book that the downfall of Greece was due
to malaria imported from Africa. Now that we know that
a progressive desiccation was in progress at the time, the
idea gains in probability. The rivers, drying up to a series
of pools in summer, would afford countless new breeding-

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

places for the larvae of the malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
Malaria probably contributed to the downfall of Rome as
well; but since Italy has more rainfall than Greece, the
malaria-spreading change would have struck her later.
But in addition the yield of agriculture in the Mediter-
ranean began to grow less ; and about the same time the
first of a new series of barbarian invasions poured in.

For the period from a.d. 500 to 1000 was definitely a
dry one. This it seems to have been which in the South
drove the Huns and Goths to the limits of Europe, and
stimulated the expansion of Islam from drought-stricken
Arabia. But it brought new life to the swampy North.
The culture of Ireland revived. In Scandinavia this was
the great age of the Vikings, the Norsemen. As toward
its close it grew less dry, the wet began to rob the Vikings
of their livelihood and their lands as surely as the drought
had robbed the steppe dwellers of theirs ; and they poured
forth in a burst of migration which took them across the
Atlantic, and eventually, in the guise of Normans, as far
as Sicily.

In the New World too the climatic changes were
similar and had the same general effects, notably upon the
story of the remarkable Maya civilization of Yucatan.
The huge monuments of the Mayas are now buried in
dense tropical jungle, which no primitive people could
hope to keep at bay. After the first flourishing period of
the Mayas, civilization retreated for centuries from Yuca-
tan, but recolonized its northern part for a short time
about a.d. 1000. The two flourishing periods of Maya
history correspond with what we have called cold, wet

CLIMATE AND HUMAN HISTORY

periods. But these were wet only in regions at a certain
distance from the poles. During these times, the storm
tracks shifted further toward the equator; and accordingly
the dry belts between temperate and tropical were shifted
equatorward too. To-day, Yucatan lies just south of
where the northern dry zone passes over into the tropical.
When the temperate rainy zone shifted south, the margin
of the dry zone also was forced southward over Yucatan,
the forest melted, and the Mayas could build an empire
there.

In the temperate zones, after the short wet period of the
eleventh century, there followed a series of minor and
drier fluctuations. There was one cold spell in the thir-
teenth century. There was another in the first half of the
seventeenth, in which the tradition of the ‘old-fashioned’
severe winter probably takes its origin (though doubtless
perpetuated by the common failing of age to decry the
present in favour of the past). Since then there has not
been any great change. True, there have been shiftings
of sea currents, such as that which brought the herrings to
the Baltic, or that which sent the cod away from the coast
of Brittany; but there have been no marked movements
of the storm belt.

This long string of conclusions is drawn from the most
diverse sources — from the deposits in northern peat .bogs,
from the old shore lines of the Caspian, from the salt lakes
of Central Asia, from the now waterless cities, such as
Palmyra, that once lay on great trade routes, from legend
and historical record. But they find a wonderful corro-
boration within the trunks of the big trees of the western
United States. Rain is the limiting factor of the tree’s
summer growth, and so the size of the growth ring in its

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

wood preserves for us the record of the season. By mea-
suring the growth rings of over two thousand big trees,
Douglass has given us a curve of climate which corre-
sponds with remarkable accuracy with what we have de-
duced from other sources. Some of these trees date back
four thousand years. In their trunks we can read of the
dry periods which spread civilization over the world but
spelled the ruin of the first Archaic Culture; of the ‘class-
ical’ rainfall maximum, as Brooks calls it, which allowed
Greece and Rome and Yucatan to achieve their destiny;
of the new drought which brought the barbarians into the
Holy City and raised the Norsemen to their first height of
activity. And they record for us the final settling of the
fertilizing, energy-giving belt of cyclonic weather in its
present place, a thousand miles and more northward of its
old position.

Thus climatic belts have not shifted seriously for almost
a thousand years. What will happen to civilization when
they move again we can hardly foresee; but we cannot
suppose that shifting climate will respect our modern
balance of power, any more than it spared the civilizations
of Mesopotamia. Climate is inexorable.

The question of the effects of climate and other natural
phenomena on human history is not all speculative. We
can see some of its very practical ramifications in the pro-
blems of cattle, soil, and grasslands. Here the chemistry
of soils enters in as well as climate, but the two are not
without relation.

From time to time, in different parts of the world, cattle
exhibit perverted appetites. They take to chewing bones,

CLIMATE AND HUMAN HISTORY

and will sometimes even devour the carcasses of other
cattle that have died. These abnormal instincts are in-
variably the prelude to grave disorders. In typical cases
the bones grow soft, the joints become swollen, the ani-
mals get thin and feeble and move stiffly and awkwardly;
their hoofs grow abnormally long; sterility and abortion
are common. Milch cows and young growing beasts are
invariably the most seriously affected; and imported
modern breeds suffer worse than the poorer native types.
Sheep may be affected in the same sort of way; and horses
too, though more rarely.

These outbreaks, which may inflict severe losses, may
only recur every few years ; or they may continue un-
abated for long periods. In every case they are confined
to particular regions. In such a region, even in years
when there is no actual disease, the animals are generally
below par. Their fertility is very low; there is much
infant mortality among the calves; growth is slow and
stunted; milk yield is subnormal.

Much search has been made for the causes of this state
of affairs. Bacteria have been blamed, and other parasites,
and poisonous plants. But all these were gradually elim-
inated. It became more and more evident that the cause
was some deficiency in the beasts’ food; and since the food
they eat draws all its supplies (save carbon and oxygen
from the inexhaustible air) from the soil, the deficiency
must ultimately lie in the soil.

Chemical analysis has confirmed this verdict. The
cause of this poor performance and actual loss, specially
grave in dry countries like Africa and Australia, is a de-
ficiency of one or more of the elements supplied to plants
from the mineral salts of the soil. The commonest defi-

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

ciency is that of phosphorus or of calcium — or of both at
once. Since both are necessary ingredients of bone, a
shortage of either will prevent proper bone growth. Both
are also necessary for the universal processes of metabol-
ism in the body; and if the supply falls short of the vital
minimum needed for tissue life, the tissues draw on the
reserves held in the skeleton. The mineral framework of
the bones is redissolved to be used up by the living cells,
hungry for the missing elements, and the skeleton grows
weak and soft. The milk too grows poor in calcium and
phosphorus, the calf has to go short of them, and, as he is
a rapidly growing organism, feels the lack even more
acutely than his parents.

The depraved appetite for carcasses and bones is a last
resort for getting back some of the missing elements into
the system. It is, however, often disastrous, for many
animals thus eat disease-producing bacteria in the decay-
ing bones, and develop serious illness from this cause ; and
even if they avoid poisoning, the mineral shortage eventu-
ally becomes so acute that the animal sickens and dies. In
other cases, mere stunting is the chief result. In the Falk-
land Islands, for example, whose pastures are very short
of calcium, an ox will hardly reach five hundred pounds in
weight, and the offspring of good breeds of horses grow
up no bigger than ponies.

The symptoms vary a good deal from place to place,
largely according as the defect is a defect mainly of phos-
phorus, — perhaps the commonest condition,— or of cal-
cium, or of both. But they all agree in taking origin in a
lack of necessary bone-building elements.

Here and there, though much more rarely, the cattle
farmer attempts to ply his trade on areas where there is a

CLIMATE AND HUMAN HISTORY

shortage of other mineral constituents. When the miss-
ing element is iron, as in parts of Kenya and New Zealand,
the animals suffer from a progressive anaemia; they grow
thinner and thinner, and finally lose control of their limbs.
In certain parts of the plains region of the United States
and Canada, on the other hand, iodine is the defaulter, and
farm animals (like the human population) suffer from the
swelling of the thyroid known as goitre, with all the
attendant symptoms of low chemical activity and stunted
growth. In some areas, the lack of iodine is so pro-
nounced that the young pigs lose all their hair and hardly
any of them survive.

The shortages, as we have said, are primarily due to a
deficiency native to the soil. It is surprising but true that
there are great stretches of country which from the outset
are unsuitable (without special treatment) for stock-raising
on any large scale, because the ground simply does not
have enough of one or another chemical element. Coun-
tries composed of igneous rock often have a shortage of
calcium. In much of the west of Scotland, where the soil
is poor in calcium and phosphorus and the pastures have
long been depleted by grazing without any return in the
shape of artificial manure, the sheep are frequently afflicted
with disease, there is a high rate of mortality among grow-
ing lambs, and the carrying capacity of the land is falling.
Iodine is generally low in limestone districts, or where, as
in parts of North America, the great meltings that followed
the Ice Age have leached it out of the soil.

Phosphorus is the trickiest of all these elements. It is
the one which usually is nearest to the border line, and

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

there are very big tracts of phosphorus-poor soil. In addi-
tion, drought apparently makes it harder for plants to get
phosphorus out of the ground, so that an arid climate will
turn a soil that elsewhere would be adequate into a phos-
phorus-deficient one.

Why, then, are these regions of the earth’s surface not
bare of wild animals ? And how is it that man can gener-
ally thrive where his cattle sicken ? The answer is that the
demands are a matter of degree. No region is entirely
without any of the essential elements. In nature, a bal-
ance is soon struck. The country supports what it can
support. If animals fall sick, they are speedily elimin-
ated; as soon as overmultiplication of any grazing animal
brings down the supply of any element per individual to
the danger point, migration relieves the pressure. Man,
on the other hand, attempts more intensive operations.
He wants the land to carry the maximum amount of stock,
and to carry it all the time. Furthermore, different ani-
mals make very different demands on the mineral re-
sources of the soil. It is the quick-growing beast which
suffers, because it has to lay by a large quantity of calcium
and phosphorus in its skeleton, of iron in its blood, of
iodine in its thyroid, all in a short time; while the slower-
growing kinds escape — -just as in man a degree of short-
age of vitamins which is almost without effect on grown
men and women may produce serious rickets in growing
children.

Now cattle are in any case quick-growing animals. A
human infant takes six months to double his weight after
birth ; a calf, in spite of his much greater size, takes only
about a month and a half. And in domestic breeds of
cattle man has intensified this quick growth, since his

ioo

CLIMATE AND HUMAN HISTORY

prime aim is the biggest possible return of meat in the
shortest possible time. Besides, he breeds for milk-yield-
ing capacities so enlarged as to be almost unnatural.
Whereas, for instance, in the natural state cows at one
lactation produce two or three hundred gallons of milk,
we ask the best modern breeds to give us up to a thousand
gallons. The native cattle of Nigeria have their first calt
at about six years; a well-fed cow of a modern breed has
hers at three. In beef breeds, the rate of putting on flesh
has been doubled. In all these ways, domesticated cattle
have been deliberately bred to make more demands upon
the soil than other beasts, and the better they are as cattle,
the more demands they must make. Accordingly, when
good European bulls have been used to grade up native
cattle in India or Africa, the result has frequently been
merely that the sickness and mortality due to mineral
deficiencies ha^e leaped up.

Man the stock-breeder has thus been putting new and
unprecedented demands upon the mineral resources of
the world’s soil. But that is not all. He has also been
depleting those resources without making any return. As
Sir John Orr says in his book, Minerals in Pastures :
‘Accompanying the visible movement of milk and beef,
there is a slow invisible flow of fertility. Every cargo of
beef or milk products, every ship ton of bones, leaves the
exporting country so much the poorer.’ For, in nature,
animals die where they live, and the constituents of their
bodies are returned to their native soil. But man changes
all that. He ships off the bodies of his animals or the pro-
ducts of those bodies to distant countries, and in every
exported pound of meat or cheese or bone meal so much
phosphorus and so much calcium and iron and mag-

IOI

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

nesium have been extracted from the soil and removed
from the country’s shores. Richardson calculates that
since 1870 the export of animals from Victoria alone has
taken out of its soil the equivalent of two million tons of
superphosphates.

As we are now beginning to see, man’s difficulties about
grassland and the products of grassland are not merely due
to local and natural deficiencies. They are due too to
deficiencies of his own making, and these artificial de-
ficiencies are cumulative and world-wide. In old days,
the cattle of mineral-deficient areas would make periodic
journeys to salt-licks, where the instinctive cravings for
the elements they lacked would save them from disease
and death. It is interesting to find the same instinctive
cravings in man. In some parts of Africa, where mineral
deficiency is serious, the black children spend their pen-
nies, not on sweets, but on lumps of ^inpurified salt,
imported from distant salt-pansand full of all the elements
for which their systems are crying out. To-day, fencing
has often made the cattle’s annual ‘ cure’ impossible. In
one part of Kenya, for instance, the settling of the country
happened to put an important salt-lick on to land allocated
to whites, to the great detriment of the native cattle, which
either could not get at their necessary supply of minerals,
or strayed and trespassed in search of it, and were lost to
their owners. Economic restrictions may have the same
effect. In the old days of the heavy French tax on salt,
you could tell without a map when you crossed the bound-
ary in the Jura from France to Switzerland by looking at
the cattle. The French cows looked poorly, the Swiss
beasts fine and healthy.

The next step was the discovery that the amount of

107 .

CLIMATE AND HUMAN HISTORY

mineral which would prevent disease in a pasture was not
enough to give the best results. By adding more, up to a
definitely ascertainable point, sheep and cattle could be
made to grow faster, to yield more milk, and especially to
be more fertile.

Thus what began as a study of local cattle diseases has
turned into a problem of the soil chemistry of grasslands.
The problem is one of first-rate importance. Cereals may
be the staff of life; but the products of grass are more
varied. Grass gives us not only meat, but also wool,
leather, milk, butter, cheese, and various valuable by-
products from bones and hides and horns. The value of
the products of grass consumed annually in Britain alone
is over £400,000,000, and the quantity of this which is
imported makes nearly a quarter of the country’s total
imports. And some countries, like New Zealand, live
almost wholly by grass.

VII

The question at issue becomes the question of the
future of the world’s grass. We have spent an enormous
amount of energy on improving wheat and maize, and
have hardly given a thought to grass; but there is little
doubt that by proper attention to the ecology and genetics
of grasses we could double the output of the world’s
pastures.

For one thing, proper dosing with mineral salts helps
the growth of plants which make greater demands on the
soil, and so takes the ecological succession a stage further
to a richer herbage. In dry areas it often helps also by
conserving more moisture in the soil. Then there are
strange and subtle interrelations between grass and the

103

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

beasts that eat it. Their trampling and their browsing
alter conditions for the herbage. Too little grazing may
allow scrub or moor to invade the pasture; too much may
impoverish the sward. Such problems are especially
prominent in new countries — in New Zealand, for in-
stance, there seem to have been no indigenous grazing
creatures, save possibly the giant flightless bird, the moa;
yet to-day 94 per cent, of the country’s exports are the
products of grass-eating animals. Here, to clear scrub-
land for sheep, not only must the scrub be cut and rooted
up and burned, but cattle must be introduced to keep the
bracken and brush from winning back the land they have
lost. As Dr Stapledon says, ‘ Cattle, no matter how prices
rule, are essential to the reclamation and maintenance of
scrublands. They are implements as necessary to the
wool grower on hilly, scrubby country as the plough to the
producer of wheat on the plains.’ Trampling, too, pre-
vents the grass from getting coarse and rough. The
amount of grazing a pasture will stand depends a good
deal on climate. If grassland (as in so much of Europe
and New Zealand) is not the natural climax of plant life,
but is only a ‘sub-climax,’ which would go on to a richer
type of vegetation, such as forest, if left to itself, then it
will stand very heavy grazing. If, however, the climate is
so dry that grass of sorts is the natural climax, it has fewer
reserves, so to speak, and heavy grazing may seriously
damage it.

But the amount of grazing will also depend on the kinds
of grasses there are to be grazed. In New Zealand the
native vegetation, unused to being nibbled down to the
ground, succumbs to this new treatment. A judicious
mixture of the right grasses and clovers from all over the

104

CLIMATE AND HUMAN HISTORY

world (only we must remember that what is right for one
place may be very wrong for another !) is rapidly raising
the productive power of grass. This will soon get to a
limit; but then the geneticist can step in and continue the
process by deliberately breeding richer and more resistant
pasture plants. A beginning has been made with this at
places like the Grass Research Station at Aberystwyth,
and the results already obtained, together with the com-
fortable knowledge of what has been actually achieved
with wheat, warrant great hopes for the future.

We could vastly increase the productive power of the
world’s grasslands by deliberately working for types of
beast that make greater demands on the grass, and types
of grass that make greater demands on the soil. We have
only got to make sure that we can continue to provide the
soil with the necessary chemical ingredients. But to
achieve this result we need the services, not only of the
farmer and the scientific agriculturist, but of the plant and
animal geneticist, the soil chemist, the systematic botan-
ist, and the ecologist; nature cannot be improved upon
without the amassing of a deal of knowledge and the
expenditure of a deal of pains.

105

THE CONCEPT OF RACE
IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN GENETICS

R ace and its problems are playing an important role
.on the world’s political stage at the present time.
But the race concept as employed by the politician, or even
in most cases by the anthropologist, is a product of the
pre-Mendelian era. How does it look to that infant pro-
digy of biological science, modern genetics ? Does it stay
as it was, does it alter its lineaments, or does it tend to fade
away into nothingness? Should we perhaps banish the
very word race from any scientific or accurate vocabulary ?
These are questions of the utmost urgency in national and
international affairs.

The fundamental thesis of modern genetics is that the
hereditary constitution of any organism (man, animal, or
plant) consists of a large number of discrete units or genes,
which normally perpetuate themselves ad infinitum by self-
reproduction. When different gene-outfits are mixed in
a cross, while there may be blending of visible characters,
there is no blending or modification of the genes them-
selves. The only alteration of the genes is due to the rare
and infrequent process of mutation.

The gene-outfit of an organism is double, one set from
the father, one from the mother. When the time comes
for the formation of reproductive cells, the two members
of each gene-pair separate in a clean-cut way from each
other, so that each reproductive cell has one or the other
member of each pair. This is what we call segregation.

106

THE CONCEPT OF RACE

With certain minor restrictions, each pair of genes segre-
gates independently of every other. The result is that
when a cross is made involving differences in several pairs
of genes, in the second and later generations every possible
combination of the different genes will occur. This is the
principle of independent assortment.

In the third place, we are coming to a more exact com-
prehension of the role played by environment. Genes
remain unaltered but their expression will change accord-
ing to the circumstances. In other words, any character
is the product of an interaction between heredity and
environment.

Most important for our purpose perhaps, modern gen-
etics clears up our ideas on the subject of variation. Varia-
tion merely implies difference, and the differences between
two individuals or strains of men or other organisms may
be due to three essentially distinct factors:

First: to differences in environment, as when differ-
ences in exposure to sunlight tan one child and leave the
other bleached and pallid.

Second : to differences caused by mutation of genes, as
between bearded and beardless varieties of grain; the
accumulation of mutations is responsible for most differ-
ences brought about in evolution.

Third: to recombination — i.e, to reshuffling of old
genes in new constellations owing to independent assort-
ment after a cross. This accounts for most of the differ-
ences observed between brothers and sisters in the same
family.

Man, owing to crossing of different stocks, shows an
unusual degree of recombinative variation ; further, owing
to the plasticity of his mind, he shows an unusual degree

107

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

of environmentally produced variation. Let us, in the
light of these facts, consider some human characteristics.
Stature will serve as an excellent example.

In man, as in other animals, various degrees of stunting
can be produced by various degrees of underfeeding and
other unfavourable conditions (disease, lack of exercise or
sunlight, etc.). The effect will also vary according to the
time at which the unfavourable conditions were operative.
As shown by recent experiments in which the growth of
healthy boys was still further increased by the addition of
milk to an abundant and varied diet, ‘underfeeding’ is a
relative term, and apparently normal conditions may not
provide the optimum.

This provides an excellent example of the interaction of
genetic and environmental factors, and is also important
from the standpoint of so-called ‘ racial ’ differences. The
fact that stature can be altered by feeding and other en-
vironmental conditions does not mean that it cannot also
be altered by change in genetic make-up, or vice versa.
To believe that one alternative excludes the other (as many
popular writers appear to do) is to fall into an elementary
logical and biological error.

As a matter of fact, marked genetic differences in stat-
ure do occur in man. No amount of extra feeding could
raise the stature of a Pigmy to that of a normal European.
The average height of Scots is considerably higher than
that of, say, southern Frenchmen, and the difference is
almost wholly due to differences in genetic make-up. The
Scots possess genes which make for height; the Pigmies,
genes which keep them small; but the height of both
races could be considerably modified by feeding and other
environmental conditions.

108

THE CONCEPT OF RACE

This will show the complexity of even such an appar-
ently simple question as that of human stature. Let me
illustrate this complexity by two particular problems in
this field. In the first place, it is known that the average
stature of various industrial nations has increased quite
definitely within the last half-century or so: does this
mean an alteration in the character of the ‘race* (national
stock), as has been frequently asserted ? In the second
place, it is a fact that the average stature of different social-
economic classes in most nations of western civilization
is different, being highest in the upper social classes: is
this because the upper classes contain genetically different
stock from the others ?

With regard to the first question — concerning the in-
crease in average national stature — the answer is fairly
clear. The increase is due in the main to better food and
better conditions of life, and not to any permanent change
in the constitution. In other words, the national stock has
not altered appreciably. Put it back in the old conditions,
and it would once more shrink to its old stature, as our
red-flowered Chinese primrose would produce white
flowers on being transferred to a hot-house (p. 44).

The second question is harder to answer. It is clear
that much of the difference must be due to the better con-
ditions enjoyed by the children of the richer classes. But
it is quite possible that there also exists an average genecic
difference between different classes; e.g. in Britain there
may be more genetically short stock in the lower classes,
derived from the early Mediterranean-type inhabitants of
the country, or selection may have been at work favouring
tall types in the upper classes {e.g. by sexual selection of
tall women), or short types in the proletariat (e.g. short

109

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

types may be better suited to town life or factory condi-
tions, and therefore be favoured in an urban-industrial
civilization). It is probable that both sets of causes, gen-
etic and environmental, are at work. At the moment, how-
ever, it is impossible to evaluate their exact share, though
the environmental is doubtless the more important.

What is true of stature applies with far greater force to
psychological characters — of intelligence, special aptitude,
temperament, and character. In the first place, such char-
acters are far more susceptible to changes in environment
(here of course predominantly social environment) than
are physical characters. Second, the social environment
shows a greater range of difference than the physical en-
vironment. High innate mathematical ability would be
unable to express itself in paleolithic society or among
present-day savages. The most consummate artistic gifts
would find little scope on a desert island. The tempera-
ment which gives its possessor the capacity for going
into a trance or seeing visions is in our modern western
world likely to land its possessor in an asylum, whereas in
various Australian and Asiatic tribes it will further his
attainment of power and practising as a medicine-man or
shaman. A warlike temperament which would have ex-
pressed itself adequately in the early days of Jewish history
would have been at a discount during the Captivity. The
same capacities, of inventiveness and initiative, which
would be expressed to the full in a pioneer country tend to
remain latent in conditions of unskilled factory labour.
Certain economic and social conditions favour the expres-
sion of the tendencies to individualism and self-assertion,

i io

THE CONCEPT OF RACE

other conditions favour the reverse; we can think of early
industrialism on the one hand, the Authoritarian State on
the other.

In general, the expression of temperamental tendencies
seems to be determined mostly in the very early years of
life, so that changes affecting the atmosphere of the home
and the theories and practice of children’s upbringing will
have large effects.

Similarly, the sweeping assertions often made as regards
the differences of women’s aptitudes and character from
men’s undoubtedly refer in the main to differences brought
about by differences in the upbringing of boys and girls
and by the different social and economic status of the
sexes. An amusing example is the exclamation of the
third-century Greek gossip-writer Athenaeus, 4 Who ever
heard of a woman cook ? ’

While it is clear that individuals endowed with excep-
tional combinations of genes will often rise superior to all
obstacles, it is equally clear that the quantity of innate
talent which a person possesses depends for its realization
and expression upon adequate facilities for its cultivation;
and that these again depend upon environmental factors
such as financial resources, social outlook, and existing
educational systems. The chief reason why children from
the upper social classes obtain proportionately more schol-
arships than those from the lower classes is because they
have better educational opportunities, not because they
are better endowed by heredity.

The bearing of such facts upon problems of race and
nationality is obvious. With the best will in the world it
is, in the present state of knowledge, impossible to disen-
tangle the genetic from the environmental factors in

iii

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

matters of* racial traits,’ ‘national character,’ and the like.
Such phrases are glibly used. In fact they are all but
meaningless, since they are not properly definable. Fur-
ther, in so far as they are capable of definition, the common
presupposition that they are entirely or mainly of a per-
manent or genetic nature is unwarranted.

Do not let me be misunderstood. It is clear that there
must exist innate genetic differences between human
groups in regard to intelligence, temperament, and other
psychological traits. There do exist genetic differences in
physical characters; there is every reason to believe that
similar differences in psychical characters also exist. How-
ever, in the first place this need not mean that the mental
differences are highly correlated with the physical — that a
dark skin, for instance, automatically connotes a tendency
toward low intelligence or irresponsible temperament.
Second, the mental differences must be expected to be like
the physical, mere matters of general averages and propor-
tions of types — in every social class or ethnic group there
will be a great quantitative range and a great qualitative
diversity of mental characters, and different groups will
very largely overlap one another. Finally, and perhaps
most important of all, there exist as yet no means for
assigning the shares of genetic constitution and of environ-
ment in producing the observed difference of type.

All the evidence we possess goes to show that the ex-
pression of such mental characters is to a very high degree
dependent on the social environment. Let us first take
so-called ‘national character.’ There was a time when
England was called ‘merry’; during the nineteenth cen-
tury that epithet was not applicable. In Elizabethan
times the English were among the most musical of the

1 1 2

THE CONCEPT OF RACE

European nations; the reverse is generally held to have
been true in late Victorian times. Again, as Hume
shrewdly notes in his Essay of National Characters , the
Spaniards were in earlier times restless and warlike;
whereas in his day and the period immediately preceding
it the reverse was the case.

Were these changes due to alteration in the genes or to
such influences as the difference between the social atmo-
sphere of the Renaissance and that of early industrialism ?
The social answer is here far the more likely. In other
cases it is manifestly the correct one. For instance, in
Carlyle’s time, the German ‘national character’ was sup-
posed to be peaceable, philosophic, musical, and individ-
ualist. After the Fran co-Prussian War it became arrogant
and militarist. Now we are witnessing the blossoming of
tendencies to state-worship, mass-enthusiasm, and the like
which we are once more assured are inherent in it. But it
would be inconceivable on any biological theory whatso-
ever, let alone on that of modern genetics, to believe that
the inherent constitution of the German people could
change so rapidly. We are, therefore, driven to believe
that the change, where it has not been merely an apparent
one, due to the bias of the recorder, has been brought
about by changes in social atmosphere and institutions.

Let us now examine the problem from a different angle,

4 racial ’ rather than 4 national.’ It is often asserted that the
Nordic ‘race’ is gifted above all others with initiative,
originality, and that all the great advances in civilization
have been due to the Nordic genius.

What are the facts ? The fundamental discoveries on
which civilization is built are the art of writing, agricul-
ture* the wheel, and building in stone. All these appear to
e 1 13

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

have originated in the Near East, among people who by no
stretch of imagination could be called Nordic or presumed
to have but the faintest admixture of genes from Nordic or
even Proto-Nordic germ-plasm.

In the classical period, Aristotle ( Politics VII ) gave what
appeared even to that great thinker cogent reasons for be-
lieving the Nordic barbarians as well as the Asiatic peoples
inherently incapable of rising to the level of Greek achieve-
ments. The inhabitants of northern climates, he says,
though endowed with plenty of spirit, are wanting in in-
telligence and skill, while the reverse is true of the Asia-
tics. The Greeks, on the other hand, are endowed with
both sets of qualities. The attitude of the Roman in-
vaders of this island toward the ancient Britons must have
been very similar to that of the British and Dutch invaders
of South and Central Africa toward the Bantu. We have
as yet no means of learning whether this latter attitude will
be any more justified than that of the dominant peoples of
classical times to the barbarian tribes which they subdued.

When we come to matters of detail, facts are equally
hostile to the myth of Nordic superiority. For instance,
exploration certainly demands initiative. But far from
Nordic types being pre-eminent in that domain, Havelock
Ellis, in his Study of British Genius , has shown that hardly
any of the great British explorers were fair-haired or in
other ways of Nordic type.

The Nordic myth has many upholders in the United
States; but, as Hrdlicka has shown in his book The Old
Americans , the early colonists were mostly round-headed
and dark or medium in complexion.

Again, the orthodox Nazi view is that Germany owes
her chief achievements to the ‘Aryan’ or Nordic elements

114

THE CONCEPT OF RACE

in her population. As we shall see later, the Nordic type,
besides being fair and tall, is long-headed. But as Weid-
enreich has shown, the greatest Germans, including Beet-
hoven, Kant, Schiller, Leibnitz, and Goethe, were all
moderately or extremely round-headed (cephalic indices
84 to 92)! Already the difficulties in the way of a simple
Nordic explanation are apparent to the Nazi ‘ intelligent-
sia * and they are now introducing such terms as Nordic -
Dinaric and Baltic-Nordic to denote certain very numerous
Germans of obviously mixed type, — a procedure which at
once robs the ‘pure race* concept of its meaning. The
influential German anthropologist Kossina, in his Ursprung
der Germanen , says that ‘Nordic souls may often be com-
bined with un-Nordic bodies, and a decidedly un-Nordic
soul may lurk in a perfectly good Nordic body.’ This
may be a convenient method of disposing of certain awk-
ward facts, but it assuredly has no point of contact with
biological science: the implication that the genes respons-
ible for ‘ the soul ’ segregate en bloc from those responsible
for ‘the body’ is more medieval than Mendelian.

One final example, and I have done. In so far as the
Jews constitute a ‘ racial type,’ they should be long-headed,
since this is a distinctive Semite character. But Einstein
is, like a large proportion of Jews, extremely broad-headed.
The Jewish problem indeed is, from the standpoint of
biology, a particularly illuminating one. The ancient
Jews were formed as the result of crossing between several
groups of markedly distinct types. Later there has always
been a certain amount of crossing between the Jews and
the non-Jewish inhabitants of the countries where they
settled, the most striking example being the black Jews of
Northern Africa and the famous historical case of the

”5

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Chazars of South Russia. The result is that the Jews of
different areas are not genetically equivalent, and that in
each country the Jewish group overlaps with the non-
Jewish in every conceivable character. The word Jew is
valid more as a socio-religious or pseudo-national descrip-
tion than as an ethnic term in any genetic sense. Many
4 Jewish 1 characteristics are without doubt much more the
product of Jewish tradition and upbringing, and especi-
ally of reaction against extreme pressure and persecution,
than of heredity.

Ill

Man is unique in the extent to which the expression of
the characteristics most important to him as a species —
intelligence, mentality, and temperament — can be influ-
enced by the character of his environment He is also
unique in respect of his purely biological variation. The
nature of such biological* variation we must briefly con-
sider.

In most wild species of animals, especially those with
wide distribution, two types of genetic phenomena are
found. In the first place, a population from any one local-
ity presents relatively little range of variability. Of this,
some is non-genetic, due to environmental and nutritional
differences; but a large amount is due to differences in
genetic composition between different individuals. Usu-
ally this genetic variability is continuous, because of gene-
differences with slight and quantitative effects — so that
some individuals are slightly darker, others slightly lighter
than the mean; some slightly bigger, others slightly
smaller; and so on. Occasionally, however, larger or
more definite individual differences occur, as for instance

116

THE CONCEPT OF RACE

between the blue and the white types of Arctic fox, or
between the normal and so-called bridled variety of the
guillemot, which latter has a white spectacle-mark round
the eye. Such differences usually depend on differences
in very few genes, and often involve only one.

Beside differences of this kind, there are differences dis-
tinguishing populations from different localities. These
are often quite marked, and constitute the diagnostic char-
acters of ‘geographical races,’ or, as they are now usually
and more satisfactorily called, subspecies. Well-marked
subspecies may be connected with one another by every
gradation or they may be sharply distinct. Gradation is
usually found when the range of the two is continuous,
discontinuity when the ranges are isolated. The latter is
most clearly manifested in island races, for instance the
St Kilda Wren, or the British Pied Wagtail.

A third kind of variation may sometimes be recognized,
as when markedly different subspecies (or mutually fertile
species) have overlapping ranges. Then, while the two
types present constant and characteristic differences over
most of the ranges along the region of overlap, individuals
are found with every possible combination of these char-
acters. Classical examples of this are the Eastern and
Western Flickers of North America, and the Hoodie and
Carrion Crows of northern Europe. This effect seems to
be produced when considerable differentiation has taken
place in the two types while isolated, and when after this
they extend their ranges so as to meet. Interbreeding
then produces every variety of Mendelian recombination.
This type of variation, due to the wholesale crossing of dis-
tinct and differentiated types, is much rarer in animals
than the geographical variation due to the divergent differ-

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

entiation of groups wholly or largely isolated from one
another geographically.

In man conditions are quite different. In this as in
numerous other respects, man is a unique animal. In the
first place, his tendency to migrate from one more or less
permanent habitat to another 1 is much stronger, than in
any other animal and has become progressively morejnani-
fest in the later stages of his history. In the second place,
because of more plastic mating reactions, physical differ-
entiation of local types has been able to go much further
than in almost any other wild species without leading to the
development of mutual sterility — i.e. to fully differenti-
ated species, sterile inter se . An African Pigmy, a Chinese,
and a typical Scandinavian Nordic, in spite of their strik-
ing differences, are mutually fertile.

The result is that crossing of types with the production
of much variation by recombination is incomparably more
frequent in man than in any other species. This crossing
has occurred between the major as well as the minor sub-
divisions of man, between groups that show large physical
differences as well as between those that approximate in
type. The great majority of native Africans, the reader
may be surprised to learn, are not pure negroes, but have
an admixture of Caucasian genes from crosses with Ham-
itic stocks. India is more of a racial melting-pot than the
United States. Mongolian invasions from the East have
left their physical traces in eastern Europe: there is an
increasing gradient of Mongol genes, from Prussia east-
ward across European Russia into Central Asia. How
the major subdivisions of man may have originated is a

1 As contrasted with the seasonal migration found in birds or the
reproductive migration of various fish.

1 18

THE CONCEPT OF RACE

large problem which I have no space to discuss here. But
however they originated and whatever degree of difference
they may show, they have been intercrossing for tens of
thousands of years, and this fact has had various important
results.

On simple Mendelian principles, the first result of a cross
between groups differing in average physical type will be to
increase variability by producing a large number of hitherto
non-existent recombinations, quite different from either of
the original types or from the intermediate between them.

Next, it should be remembered that after crossing,
selection may play a very important role. For instance,
it appears that after the irruption of light-skinned con-
querors from temperate latitudes into more tropical areas
inhabited by darker-skinned peoples, natural selection has
seen to it that combinations with darker skins survive the
excessive intensity of the sunlight , 1 while those with fair
skin tend to die out, for instance in Greece and in India.
In India especially, the social selection brought about via
the caste system seems to have exerted pressure for the
retention in the highest castes of the general features of
the conquering group — ‘Aryan/ as they used to be called
(and perhaps rightly in that particular land); but there
seems little doubt that the genes for these are now associ-
ated with a different set of pigmentation-genes from those
present in the original invaders. Similarly, in Greece to-
day the average distribution of genes and the most fre-
quent types of gene-combination must be very different

1 This is so even when there has been counter-selection of a social
nature against dark skin, e.g. in the higher castes of India. These are
on the average much lighter in skin-colour than the lower castes, but are
clearly darker than the original stock from which they trace descent.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

not only from those found either in the Achaeans or in the
indigenous Pelasgian population before the irruption of
the former in the second millennium b.c., but also from
those characteristic of the mixed population in early
classical times.

It must further be emphasized that, after crossing, the
various gene-combinations will, in the absence of selec-
tion, automatically maintain themselves in proportions
which depend on the proportions of the different genes
originally contributed to the cross. There will not be a
uniform mixed type, but the same general tendency to
form recombinations will occur, generation after genera-
tion. Those who have been to Sicily know how types
immediately classifiable as ‘Greek,’ ‘Moorish,’ and ‘Nor-
man,* and those with certain negroid characters, still crop
up strikingly in the more mixed general population after
centuries of crossing. The same phenomenon occurs in
Britain, where we still find men of well-marked Mediter-
ranean type, dark and small and swarthy. In Germany
too men with dark and fair hair, round and long head, tall
and stumpy stature regularly recur as segregation-types
from the mixture of Nordic, Eurasiatic (Alpine), and
numerous other stocks, which constitutes the general pop-
ulation. There is no sign of a tendency towards a uniform
blend.

In addition to the variation produced by the crossing of
already differentiated groups, which in man thus appears
to be basic and not merely of the secondary importance
that it assumes in other species, the general variability in-
herent in most animal populations is also to be found in
Homo sapiens . For instance, some, at all events, of the
variation in stature, proportions, pigmentation, intellig-

120

THE CONCEPT OF RACE

ence, etc., which are to be found in all human groups must
be ascribed to this type of variation. I may stress the fact
that the main types of body-build and temperament recur
in all ethnic groups, black, white, brown, or yellow.

It will thus be clear that the picture of the hereditary
constitution of human groups which can now be drawn in
the light of modern genetics is very different from any
which could be framed in the pre-Mendelian era. Popu-
lations differ from one another with respect to the genes
which they possess. Sometimes certain genes are wholly
absent from a group — e.g. that for light eye-colour among
Central African tribes, or for frizzy hair among the
Eskimos. Most frequently, however, the difference is a
quantitative one, in regard to the proportions of genes
present and in the frequency of certain main types of
gene-combinations. This is eminently characteristic of
the populations of western Europe.

To sum the matter up, intercrossing between differen-
tiated types is frequent as the aftermath of large-scale
migration and gives rise to many previously unrealized
gene-combinations. Infiltrative individual migration also
takes place very frequently and leads to the steady diffu-
sion of genes from one region to another. There is no
such thing as blending inheritance, which would cause
gene-recombinations to disappear gradually after crossing:
in the absence of selection, the various types of combina-
tion will tend to recur in the same proportion, generation
after generation.

It follows that practically all human groups are of decid-
edly mixed origin. Within any one group we should,

I 21

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

therefore, expect the variation due to recombination to be
great. This last point is of great importance. The ex-
pectation of the anthropologist of the Darwinian era, when
the a priori idea of blending inheritance was in fashion,
was of groups with well-marked characteristics, and a not
large range of chiefly quantitative variation ; the expecta-
tion of the Mendelian geneticist, knowing the facts of
inheritance and the migratory habits of man, is of groups
possessing a large range of variation, often of striking
extent, and only capable of being distinguished by statis-
tical methods. In such groups the mean values for char-
acters, though still useful, no longer have the same theor-
etical importance. The range of variation of characters is
of far greater practical importance, as is also the range of
qualitatively different recombination-types. The two re-
sultant race-concepts are fundamentally dissimilar.

To these considerations derived from the modern study
of inheritance may be added others due to the historical
progress of ethnology. The modern outlook had its be-
ginnings in the Renaissance. In its growth the explora-
tion of the planet, first geographical and then scientific,
went hand in hand with the liberation of thought and the
transformation of social and economic structure. In the
earliest part of this modern period the voyages of the great
explorers and of the traders and colonizers who succeeded
them brought home to man a new realization of the variety
of the human race and the marked distinction between its
types. The red man of the New World, the black man of
Africa, the yellow man of the Far East, the brown man of
the East Indies — it was the differences between human
types which impressed themselves upon general thought.

The patient labours of anthropological science during
122

THE CONCEPT OF RACE

the last hundred years or so, however, have given us a
wholly different picture. The different main types exist,
but they are vaguer and less well-defined than was at first
thought. Within each main type there are geographical
trends of variation and there are connecting links even
between the most distinct major types. Quite apart from
the results of very recent crossings, every gradation exists
between the Negro and the European along several differ-
ent lines, via Hamite, Semite, and Mediterranean ; every
gradation exists between the white man and the yellow,
through east-central Europe, across Russia, to Mongolia
and China ; every gradation exists between the yellow man
and the already mixed dark-brown Asiatic. Even among
the Eskimos and the Pigmies we find evidence of crossing
with other types. The same process, of course, is continu-
ing to-day and at an increasing rate. New links, often
along new racial lines, are yearly being forged between
negro and white in countries like the United States, Brazil,
Portugal, and Africa; new links between yellow and
white and between brown and white in various parts of the
world; new links between yellow and brown all over the
East.

We can thus no longer think of common ancestry, a
single original stock, as the essential badge of a ‘race.’
What residuum of truth there is in this idea is purely
quantitative. Two Englishmen, for instance, are almost
certain to have more ancestors in common than an Eng-
lishman and a negro. For the sharply defined qualitative
notion of common ancestry we must substitute the statis-
tical idea of the probable number of common ancestors
which two members of a group may be expected to share
in going back a certain period of time. Being quantitative

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

and statistical, this concept cannot provide any sharp
definition of race, nor do justice to the results of recom-
bination. If, however, concrete values for the probability
could be obtained for various groups (which would be a
matter of great practical difficulty) it would provide a
‘coefficient of common ancestry' which could serve as the
only possible measure of their biological relationship.

The result is that the popular and the scientific views of
‘race’ no longer coincide. The word ‘race* as applied
scientifically to human groupings has lost any sharpness of
meaning. To-day it is hardly definable in scientific terms,
except as an abstract concept which may under certain
conditions, very different from those now prevalent, have
been realized approximately in the past, and might, under
certain other but equally different conditions, be again
realized in the distant future.

In spite of the work of the geneticist and anthropologist
there is still a lamentable confusion between the ideas of
race , culture , and nation . In this respect anthropologists
themselves have not been blameless, and therefore the
formidable amount of loose thinking on the part of writers,
politicians, and the general public is not surprising. In
the circumstances, it is very desirable that the term race as
applied to man should be dropped from our scientific and
general vocabulary. Its employment as a scientific term
had a dual origin. In part it represents merely the taking
over of a popular term, in part the attempt to apply the
biological concept of variety or geographical race to man.
But the popular term is so loose that it turns out to be un-
workable, and the scientific analysis of human populations
shows that the variation of man has taken place on quite
other lines than those characteristic of other animals. In

124

THE CONCEPT OF RACE

other animals the term subspecies has been substituted for
race. In man migration and crossing have produced such
a fluid state of affairs that no such clear-cut term, as
applied to existing conditions, is permissible. What we
observe is the relative isolation of groups, their migration
and their crossing.

Scientifically, there are only two methods of treatment
which can be used for the genetic definition of human
groups. One is to define them by means of the characters
which they exhibit, the other to define them by means of
the genes which they contain. In both cases the proced-
ure must be primarily quantitative. In any group certain
characters or genes may be totally absent, and when this is
so we can make a qualitative distinction. More generally
the distinction will be quantitative. The characters or
genes which are present will be present in different pro-
portions in different groups: their most frequent com-
binations will also differ from one group to the next. It is
only by means of this quantitative difference in representa-
tion that, in the main, we can hope to define the difference
between one group and another.

The method of characters and the method of genes
differ in their scientific value and in their practicability.
It is much easier to attempt a classification in terms of
characters, and indeed this is the only method that is im-
mediately practicable (as well as providing a necessary
first step toward the classification in terms of genes).

But it is less satisfactory from the scientific point of
view. This is partly because apparently similar characters
may be determined by different genes and, conversely,
because the same gene in combination with different con-
stellations of other genes may produce very different char-

125

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

acters. It is also less satisfactory because a character is
always the result of an interaction between constitution
and environment. To disentangle the genetically un-
important effects of environment from the genetically
essential action of genes is difficult in all organisms and
especially so in man, where the social and cultural environ-
ment — that unique character of the human species — plays
a predominant part. Until we have invented a method for
distinguishing the effects of social environment from those
of genetic constitutions we shall be unable to say anything
of scientific value on such vital topics as the possible
genetic differences in intelligence, initiative, and aptitude
which may distinguish different human groups.

It would be highly desirable if we could banish the
question-begging term ‘race’ from all discussions of
human affairs and substitute the noncommittal phrase
‘ethnic group.’ That would be a first step toward rational
consideration of the problem at issue.

126

THE SIZE OF LIVING THINGS

T he size of things has a fascination of its own. There
is a certain thrill in hearing that a fish weighing hun-
dreds of pounds has been caught with rod and line; that
one of the big trees of California has an archway cut
through its bole capable of letting a stagecoach pass; that
the bulkiest of men have attained a quarter of a ton weight;
that it takes two harvest mice to weigh as much as a half-
penny ; that an average man contains only about two and a
half cubic feet; or that many bacteria, capable of produc-
ing virulent diseases, are so small that it would take over
three hundred, end to end, to get from one side to the
other of the full stop at the end of this sentence.

But when we look into the subject more systematically,
the passing thrill of surprise gives place to a deeper inter-
est. For one thing, we shall find ourselves confronted by
the problem of the limitations of size. Why has no animal
ever achieved a weight of much more than a hundred
tons ? Why are the predatory dragon-flies never as large as
eagles, or these social beings, the ants, as big as those
other social beings, men? Why do lobsters and crabs
manage to reach weights more than a hundred times
greater than the biggest insect, but more than a thousand
times smaller than the biggest vertebrates? Why, to
choose something which at first sight seems to have noth-
ing to do with size — why do you never see an insect drink-
ing from a pool of water? As we follow up the clues, we

127

A diagram of relative sixes In each major division (A, B, C, D, £) of the diagram, all the creatures are drawn
to the same scale. The smallest of each division is enlarged to make the largest of the division following

ABC

1 A very large whale 9 The dog (8) enlarged 18 The queen bee (16) enlarged

2 The largest known land carnivore, 10 A thrush 19 The frog (17) enlarged

the extinct reptile Tyrannosaurus 11 A humming bird 20 A flea

3 A large elephant 12 A giant land snath 21 A very large single celled animal

4. A giant cuttlefish 13 The common snail (Bursana)

5 The largest recorded crocodile 14. The bulkiest insect

6 An ostrich. 1 5 A mouse

7 The largest known jellvfish 16 A queen bee

I A man and a dog 17 The smallest vertebrate

128

22. Bursaru (21) enlarged.

23. A human unfertilized ovum.

24. A human sperm.

25. A cheese- mite.

26. A human gland-celL

27. The gland-cell (26) enlarged.

2&. A human red blood-corpuscle

29. A very large bacterium.

30. A small bacterium.

31. An ultramicroscopic filter-passing virus

I2 9

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

shall begin to understand some of life's difficulties in a
new way — the difficulties attendant upon very small size,
the quite different difficulties attendant upon great bulk;
and we shall realize that size, which we are so apt to take
for granted, is one of the most serious problems with
which evolving life has had to cope.

Reflection upon our own size will also help us toward
an estimate of our position in the universe — of how we
stand between the infinitely big and the infinitely little.
It has been only in the last few decades that this estimate
could be justly made. We knew the bulk of the big trees
and whales ; but not till quite recently did the existence of
filter-passing viruses reveal to us the lower limit of size in
life. And when we pass to the lifeless background, we
seem, in discovering the electron, to have attained to the
ultimate degree of smallness, to the indivisible unit of
world stuff; and the development of Einstein’s theory has
made it possible to state at least a minimum weight for the
entire universe. Where does the physical body of man
stand? Is he nearer in size to whale or to bacterium?
How many electrons are there in a man ? And how does
this number compare with the number of men it would
take to weigh down the earth? — the sun? — the entire
universe ?

Let us begin with a foundation of hard fact, giving the
weights in grams. A gram is about ^ of an ounce; a
thousand grams make a kilogram, close to 2^ pounds; a
thousand kilograms make a metric ton, almost identical
with an English ton. A milligram is a thousandth part of
a gram. But both upward and downward the weights
prolong themselves to regions where we have no units to
deal with them. The simplest way to bring them home is

130

THE SIZE OF LIVING THINGS

to express them all in grams, but in powers of ten. The
exponent, or little number after and above the ten, repre-
sents the number of ciphers to put into the figure for
grams. When, for instance, the weight of the moon is
given as 7 x io^g., this means yx 1,000,000,000,000,-
000,000,000,000 grams, or, since there are one million
grams to the ton, seven million million million tons — that
is, seven trillion tons. When the exponent has a minus
sign in front of it, it denotes a fraction of a gram, and again
the number of ciphers in the denominator of the fraction
is given by the exponent. Thus one of the insulin-secret-
ing cells of our pancreas weighs about icr 9 gram. This is
i T o ^ o,Lo,ooo gram, or one millionth of a milligram.

In most cases, since the specific gravity of protoplasm is
very close to that of water, the weight in grams is close to
the volume in cubic centimetres. With trees, this volume
will be considerably greater than the weight; while with
armoured creatures like crabs or some dinosaurs the
weight in grams will exceed the volume in cubic centi-
metres. Let us also remember that volumes go up as the
cube of the linear dimensions. An animal weighing a ton,
for instance, would be just balanced by a cubic vessel full
of water measuring one metre each way. The correspond-
ing cube of water which would balance a human insulin-
producing cell would measure io~ 3 centimetre along each
side, which is centimetre, or millimetre, or iO|x,
one (x being xflW millimetre.

Since the weights of animals and plants are variable,
since many are not very accurately known, and others have
to be calculated, with a certain unavoidable margin of
error, from their linear dimensions, we do not pretend to
give precise weights, but only put organisms between

13 1

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

certain limits of weight, the upper limit of each pigeon-
hole being ten times as heavy as the lower. Thus most
men come in the class between io 4 and io 6 grams — be-
tween ten and a hundred kilograms. Men are near the
upper limit of the class ; in the same class, in descending
order, come sheep, swans, and the largest known crus-
taceans.

So much for necessary introduction ; now for the facts.
The largest organisms are vegetables, the big trees of Cali-
fornia, with a weight of nearly a thousand tons. A num-
ber of other trees exceed the largest animals in weight, and
a still greater number in volume. The largest animals are
whales, some of which considerably exceed one hundred
tons in weight. They are not only the largest existing
animals, but by far the largest which have ever existed, for
the monstrous reptiles of the secondary period, which are
often supposed to hold the palm for size, could none of
them have exceeded about fifty tons. Some of the lazy
great basking sharks reach about the same weight; so,
since we shall never know the exact size of the dinosaurs,
the second prize must be shared between reptiles and
elasmobranch fish.

The largest invertebrates are to be found among the
molluscs; some of the giant squids weigh two or three
tons. The runner-up among invertebrate groups is a dark
horse; very few even among professional zoologists would
guess that it is the coelenterates. But so it is. In the
northern seas, specimens of the jellyfish Cyattea arctica
have been found with a disc over seven feet across and
eighteen inches thick, and great bulky tentacle^ five feet

132

THE SIZE OF LIVING THINGS

long hanging down below. One of these cannot weigh
less than half a ton, with bulk equal to that of a good-sized
horse. The clams come next, if we take their shell into
account, for Tridacna may weigh nearly as much as a man.
If, however, we go by bulk of living substance, the giant
clam is beaten by a crustacean, the giant spider crab from
Japanese seas.

Then come a number of groups, all of which manage to
exceed one kilogram, but fall short of ten. There are the
hydroid polyps, with the deep-water Branchiocerianthus
which, rooted in the mud, and with gut subdivided into
hundreds of tiny tubes for greater strength, stands over a
yard high and sifts the slow-passing deep-sea currents for
food with its net of tentacles, adjusted by being hung from
an obliquely-set disc. There are the largest marine snails;
the largest lamp-shells; the largest sea-urchins, starfish,
sea-cucumbers, and sea-lilies; and, rather surprisingly,
the largest bristle-worms, both marine forms and earth-
worms. Possibly the largest tapeworms, such as Bothrio -
tephalus latus , which may reach a length of over seventy
feet of coiled living ribbon in human intestines, just come
into this class, though their flatness handicaps them.

The insects and spiders come far below, the largest
beetles and tarantulas not exceeding two or three ounces.
The pigmy among animal groups is that of the rotifers or
wheel animalcules, the most gigantic among which fails to
weigh ten milligrams! They comprise, too, the smallest
of all multicellular animals, some of their adult males
weighing considerably less than a thousandth of a milli-
gram, so that it would take about a thousand of them to
equal one of our striated muscle fibres, and over a million
of them to weigh as much as a hive-bee.

133

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Even the biggest rotifers are much smaller than the
biggest among the Protozoa, or single-celled animals.
Some of the extinct nummulites, flattened disc-shaped
Foraminifera, were bigger than a shilling, and must have
weighed well over a gram. They easily beat many small
fish and frogs in size, and were bigger than the largest
ants, which, though the most successful of all inverte-
brates, never reach one gram in weight, and are usually
much less. The largest ant colonies known possess a
million or so inhabitants. This whole population would
weigh about as much as one large man. Indeed, the small
size of most insects is at first hearing barely credible.
Three average fleas go to a milligram. If you bought an
ounce of fleas, you would have the pleasure of receiving
over eighty thousand of them. Even the solid hive-bee
weighs less than a gram — over five hundred bees to the
pound, nearly a hundred thousand to outweigh a single
average man !

The lower limit of size among the various groups is
much more constant than the upper. The smallest insects,
Crustacea, most groups of worms, and coelenterates, all
lie between one hundredth and one thousandth of a milli-
gram. Some very primitive worms run down one class
further, and rotifers two. The smallest molluscs, lamp-
shells, and echinoderms are between ten and a thousand
times larger, while the smallest vertebrate is four classes
up — ten thousand times as big. Even so the difference
between the maximum sizes attained by different main
groups is greater by a hundred thousand times than the
difference between their minima.

There is clearly a lower limit set to a multicellular ani-
mal by the fact that it must consist of at least several

i34

THE SIZE OF LIVING THINGS

hundred cells. But it seems to be impossible or unprofit-
able to construct a vertebrate out of less than several
hundred million cells. The vertebrates, both at top and
at bottom, are the giants of the animal kingdom.

It is a surprise to find a frog that weighs as much as a
fox-terrier. It is a still greater surprise to know that there
exist fully formed adult insects — a beetle or two, and
several parasitoid wasplike creatures — of smaller bulk than
the human ovum and yet with compound eyes, a nice ner-
vous system, three pairs of jaws and three pairs of legs,
veined wings, striped muscles, and the rest ! It is rather
unexpected that the smallest adult vertebrate is not a fish,
but a frog; and it is most unexpected to find that the
largest elephant would have ample clearance top and
bottom inside a large whale’s skin, while a full-sized horse
outlined on the same whale would look hardly larger than
a crest embroidered on the breast pocket of a blazer.

Then we come to single cells. By far the largest is — or
was — the yolk of the extinct Aepyornis’s egg, which must
have weighed some ten pounds. But eggs are exceptional
cells; so are multinucleated cells like striated muscle
fibres and the biggest nummulites. Of cells with a single
nucleus, some protists such as Foraminifera may reach
over a milligram — gigantic units of protoplasm ; and the
ciliate Bursaria is nearly as big. But among ordinary
tissue cells of Metazoa the largest are only about one
hundredth of a milligram, while average cells of a mammal
range between a thousandth and a ten-millionth of a milli-
gram. In our own frames, the body of a large nerve-cell
is well over ten thousand times bulkier than a red blood-
corpuscle or a spermatozoon — a difference five or ten
times greater than that between the largest whale and the

135

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

average man. (In these calculations the outgrowths of the
nerve-cells have been left out of account, as peculiar pro-
ducts of cell activity. If they are included, then the spinal
sensory and motor nerve-cells, supplying the limbs of the
giant dinosaurs and of giraffes, take the palm for size; but
even they can only reach a few milligrams, in spite of
being over ten feet long.)

The smallest free-living true cells are in the same size-
class with the smallest tissue cells ; but parasitic Protozoa,
which live inside other cells, may be a hundred times
smaller. Bacteria are built on a different scale. The
largest of them are little bigger than the smallest tissue
cell, and the average round bacterium or coccus is a thou-
sand times smaller. These finally pass below the limits of
microscopic vision, until, with the filter-passers, such as
the virus of distemper or yellow fever, we reach organisms
with only about a thousand protein molecules. Some-
where near these we may expect to find the lower limit of
size proscribed to life; for several hundred molecules are
probably as necessary in the construction of an organic
unit as are several hundred cells for the construction of a
multicellular animal.

Ill

Having made a little voyage of discovery among the
bare facts, it is time to begin a quest for principles. The
great bulk of land vertebrates range from ten grams to a
hundred kilograms. What is it that has led to this com-
paratively narrow range of weight — not a fifth of that
found in animal life as a whole — being most popular in
the dominant group ?

A disadvantage in being very small is that you are not
136

THE SIZE OF LIVING THINGS

big enough to be out of reach of annoyance by the mere
inorganic molecules of the environment. The molecules
of a fluid like water are rushing about in all directions at a
very considerable speed. They run against any object in
the water, and bounce oflF again. When the surface of the
object is big enough for there to be thousands of such
collisions every second, the laws of probability will see to
it that the number of bumps on one side will be closely
equal to that on the other ; and the steady average effect
of the myriad single bumps we know and measure as fluid
pressure. But when the diameter of the object falls to
about i(x, it may quite easily happen that one side of it
momentarily receives an unusually heavy rain of bumps
while the other is spared, and the object will be pushed
bodily in one direction. The result is that the smallest
organisms (like the old lady in the nursery rhyme) can
never keep quiet; they are in a constant St Vitus’s dance,
christened Brownian movement after its discoverer.

Such hectic existences are only possible when the sur-
face is absolutely very small ; but let us not forget that an
absolutely very small surface must be relatively a big one.
This question of relative surface is perhaps the most im-
portant single principle involved in our dealings with size.
Simply magnify an object without changing its shape, and,
without meaning to, you have changed all its properties.
For the surface increases as the square of the diameter, the
volume as its cube ; and so the amount of surface relative
to bulk must diminish with size. Let us take an example
or so. The filter-passing organisms photographed by
Barnard with ultra-violet light are across; the yolk or
true ovum of an emu’s egg is about i o centimetres across
— a million times greater. Both are of the same shape;

137

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

but the proportion of surface to bulk is one million times
greater in the filter-passer than in the bird’s egg. In other
words, if the substance of the bird’s egg were divided into
round pieces each as big as one of the filter-passers, the
same weight of material would have a million times more
surface than before. Or again, a big African elephant is
roughly one million times as heavy as a small mouse. The
amount of surface for each gram of elephant is only one-
hundredth of what it is in the mouse.

The most familiar effect of this surface-volume relation
is on the rate of falling. The greater the amount of sur-
face exposed relative to weight, the greater the resistance
of the air. So that it comes about that the spores of bac-
teria or ferns or mushrooms, or the pollen-grains of higher
plants, are kept up by the feeblest air currents ; and even
in still air they cannot fall fast. They float down, like
Alice down the well, rather than fall. If a mouse is
dropped down the shaft of a coal-mine, the acceleration
due to gravity soon comes up against the retardation due
to air resistance, and after a hundred feet or so a steady
rate is reached, which permits it to reach the bottom dazed
but unhurt, however deep the shaft. A cat, on the other
hand, is killed; a man is not only killed, but horribly
mangled ; and if a pit pony happens to fall over, the speed at
the bottom is so appalling that the body makes a hole in the
ground, and is so thoroughly smashed that nothing remains
save a few fragments of the bones and a splash on the walls.

Thp same principles hold good for the much slower rate
of falling through water; and consequently the micro-
scopic animal will have to make much less effort to prevent
itself sinking than any fish unprovided with a gas-bladder.

Relative surface is also important for temperature regu-

138

THE SIZE OF LIVING THINGS

lation in warm-blooded animals; for the escape of heat
must be proportional to the surface, through which it leaks
away. As the heat is derived from the combustion of the
food, a mouse must eat much more than a man in pro-
portion to its weight to make up for this extra heat-loss
which its small size unavoidably imposes upon it. The
reason that children need proportionately more food than
grown-ups is not only due to the fact that they are grow-
ing, but also to the fact that their heat-loss is relatively
greater. A baby of a year old loses more than twice as
much heat for each pound of its weight than does a twelve-
stone man. For this reason, it is doubtful whether the
attempt should be made to harden children by letting
them go about with bare legs in winter; their heat-re-
quirements are greater than their parents’, not less.

The intake of food and oxygen is another function with
which surfaces are concerned. When a cell doubles its
linear size, the bulk to be nourished increases eightfold,
but the surface through which nourishment is to be ab-
sorbed increases only fourfold. It is obvious that such a
process could not go on indefinitely, any more than could
the growth of a nation dependent on foreign trade if its
ports and harbour facilities fell progressively behind the
increase of its population. The biggest single cells (ex-
cluding such mere storehouses as egg-yolks) have only
attained their size by adopting some device for increasing
relative surface — they are flattened, or cylindrical, or, like
Foraminifera, have much of their substance in the form of
a network of fine living threads, or possess long thin pro-
cesses, like nerve-cells.

139

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

With many-celled animals, similar considerations still
hold good. Food must be absorbed from a surface — the
surface of the intestine. In shiall forms, enough surface is
provided by a straight, smooth tube, but this would never
work in larger animals. To get over the difficulty, all
sorts of dodges have been adopted. In large flatworms,
the whole gut is branched; in large Crustacea like lobsters
and crabs, absorption mostly goes on in the feathery
‘liver,’ which provides thousands of tubes instead of one;
in the earthworm, the absorptive surface of the intestine is
nearly doubled by a projecting fold ; in ourselves, not only
is the effective inner surface of the intestine multiplied
many times by the myriads of miniature finger-like villi,
but the intestine itself is coiled ; and in some herbivores
the coiling is prodigious. Among lower animals without
a fixed adult size, the period for which rapid growth can
continue must often depend upon the inherited construc-
tion of the intestine. For instance, in flatworms, if the gut
is a simple tube, increase of bulk rapidly brings down the
relative surface, and the animal while still quite small can
only eat enough to keep itself going, but not to grow;
while if the gut is elaborately branched, growth will not be
slowed down until a much larger bulk has been reached.

The same sort of arguments apply equally well to other
processes, such as respiration and excretion, whose amount
depends on amount of available surface. In small animals
gills can be unbranched ; in big ones they must be feathery.
Large vertebrates like us could not breathe if their lungs
were not partitioned off into millions of tiny sacs. The
coiling and multiplication of kidney tubules in large ani-
mals are equally necessary. An embryo frog excretes by
means of three pairs of kidney tubules. An adult frog

140

THE SIZE OF LIVING THINGS

would die from accumulation of waste substances if he
possessed only six large tubes of equivalent proportions,
even if their walls remained thin enough for secretion;
what he needs is many thousands of small tubules.

When the animal is small, no transport system is neces-
sary to get the food or water or oxygen to the cells from
the original absorptive surface; all goes well by diffusion
alone. But bulk brings difficulties here too. The flatness
of the larger flatworms is partly due to the need for hav-
ing every cell near enough to the surface to be able to get
oxygen by diffusion. The elaborate branching of their
intestines and all other internal organs is needed to ensure
that no cell shall be more than a microscopic distance away
from a source of digested food. Mahomet and the moun-
tain meet halfway. With the biological invention of a
blood-system, this need for branching disappears. The
enormous area of surface which is needed is now furnished
by the linings of innumerable tiny vessels, and the organs
themselves can revert to a compact form. Finally, insects
and spiders have developed a breathing system which
supplies air direct to the tissues, providing a large surface
for gas exchange in the tiny end branches of the air-tubes,
which penetrate even into the individual cells.

In swimming and flying, too, surface comes into play.
No large animal could move with sufficient rapidity by
means of the microscopic ‘hairs' we call cilia, since the
size of a single cilium can never be more than microscopic,
and their number depends on the extent of surface. The
largest animals provided with cilia are new-hatched tad-
poles, and all they can achieve is an exceedingly slow
gliding.

When muscles are employed in swimming, their force

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

must be applied to the water through the intermediary of
some surface — the body may be wriggled, or its motions
communicated to an enlargement at the tail, or limbs de-
veloped as oars or paddles. When the animal is small,
these swimming surfaces are relatively so big that little or
no special adaptations are needed; but once it grows
bulky, the swimming surface must be enlarged. The
body itself is expanded sideways, as in leeches; or up and
down, as in sea-snakes; a regular tail-fin is developed, as
in most fish; or the limbs are expanded into flat plates, as
in turtle or swimming-crab.

The necessary increase of surface in swimming limb or
tail can at first be achieved by stiffening and multiplying
hairs and spines ; but as soon as the animal exceeds a few
millimetres in length this ceases to be enough, and the
organ itself must be expanded. The change is beauti-
fully seen within the individual development of many
crustaceans.

The same applies to wings. All flying animals more
than a fraction of a gram in weight require a broad and
continuous expanse to fly with, whether this be a sheet of
skin, as in bats, a marvellous compound structure such as
the wing of a bird, or the thin hinged flap of an insect’s
wing. But if they are much smaller, a double row of hairs
on either side of a central rod will serve perfectly well.
This is seen in some minute insects, such as the little
thrips, which include several plant pests, and some tiny
wasps which parasitize other insects’ eggs. The lovely
plume-moths are a little larger, and are intermediate in
wing construction; their flight surface is made of hairs,
but it is only rendered sufficient by a multiplication of the
number of hair-fringed rods.

142

THE SIZE OF LIVING THINGS

There are many other ways in which the big animal in-
evitably fails to be a mere scale enlargement of its smaller
relatives. The relative size of many organs decreases in-
stead of increasing with total absolute bulk, so that in a big
animal they do not have to be proportionately so large as
in a small one. Relative wing-size is a case in point.

Then everyone knows the small-eyed look of an ele-
phant or, still more, of a whale. To obtain a good image,"
an eye has to be of a certain absolute size; this is because
the image even in our own eyes is really a mosaic, each
sensory cell in the retina behaving as a unit. The image
we see is built up out of unitary spots of colour, just as a
half-tone picture in a newspaper is built up out of combin-
ations of single black and white dots. To give an image of
a reasonably large field, they must be numerous. Once a
certain absolute size of eye is reached, any advantage due
to further enlargement is more than counterbalanced by
the material used and the difficulties of construction, just
as very little advantage is to be gained in photography by
making a camera over full-plate size. Even in a giraffe,
which has an exceptionally large eye for a big animal, the
eye’s relative weight is small compared with that of a rat.

Most sense-organs behave in a similar way. This is
especially true of the organs of touch and temperature in
the skin. It matters to a mouse to be able to deal with
things the size of breadcrumbs. But such trivialities do
not concern an elephant; the elephant accordingly can,
and does, have its skin sense-organs much more thinly
spread over its surface.

This in turn has an effect on the size of the nervous
143

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

system ; for the fewer the sense-organs, the fewer sensory
nerve-cells are needed, and the smaller the size of the
ganglia on the spinal nerve-roots which are composed of
sensory nerve-cells. Since the sense-organs of touch are
distributed over the surface, we should only expect these
ganglia to grow proportionately to surface, and not to
bulk, even if the sense-organs were as thickly scattered
over the skin of a big as of a small animal ; but as they are
more sparsely scattered in the big animal the weight of a
ganglion does not even keep up with the size of the ani-
mal's surface, and its growth is actually only just more
than proportional to the square root of the weight.

As a matter of fact, when the nervous system as a whole,
or the brain by itself, is compared in a series of related
mammals or birds of different size, it is found to increase
only about as fast as the surface, instead of keeping pace
with the weight; and the same is true of the heart. It
would take us too far to go into the detailed reasons for
this ; but the fact that a large animal does not need a brain
or heart of the same proportional size as a small model of
the same type is important. It warns us not to be too
hasty in drawing conclusions as to intelligence from per-
centage brain- weight, or as to the efficiency of circulation
from percentage heart-weight. Size itself reduces the per-
centage weight ; we must know the proper formula before
we can tell whether an individual, a sex, or a species has a
brain-weight effectively above or below that of another indi-
vidual, sex, or species of different magnitude. In man,
comparisons (often invidious) have frequently been made
between the brain-size of men and women ; but not until
Dubois and Lapicque worked out the proper formulae for
change of brain-proportion with size was it possible to say

144

THE SIZE OF LIVING THINGS

whether the smaller brain of women meant anything save
that the bodies of women were smaller.

Another such example, but of a rather different type.
We marvel at the size of an ostrich’s egg, which would
provide a large party with breakfast, and is the equivalent
by weight of about twenty hen’s eggs. But we forget to
marvel at the ostrich itself, which weighs as much as about
forty or fifty hens. The size of birds’ eggs, in fact, does
not increase as fast as the size of the birds that lay them. A
humming-bird lays an egg 1 5 per cent, of its own weight;
that of a thrush is 9 per cent., that of a goose some 4 per
cent., and that of an ostrich only i*6 per cent. Two com-
peting forces are here at work. It is advantageous to have
large eggs, since they give the young bird a better start in
life; but the purely physical fact that all the new material
for the egg’s enlargement must pass through the egg’s sur-
face will, as bulk grows, slow down egg-increase below
body-increase. And, as a matter of fact, we find that in
quite small birds, below the size of a goose or swan, egg-
weight increases only a little faster than body-surface.

These figures apply to averages only. Adjustments can
be made in response to special needs. In wading birds the
young must run about immediately on being hatched ; and
accordingly their egg-size is well above that of equal-sized
birds whose young are born naked and fed in the nest.
The common cuckoo, to deceive its hosts, must have an
egg not too unlike theirs in size; and accordingly its egg
is uniquely small — appropriate to a bird one-third of its
body-weight. The limitation of egg-size is prescribed by
laws which apply to dead as well as to living matter; its
regulation within these inexorable limits is the affair of the
interplay of biological forces.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

We come back again to the advantages and disadvan-
tages of size. At the outset, it is not until living units are
quit of the frenzy of Brownian movement that they them-
selves become capable of accurately regulated locomotion.
The first desirable step in size is to become so much bigger
than ordinary molecules that you can forget about them.

But even then you are still microscopic, still wholly at
the mercy of anything but the most imperceptible cur-
rents. Only by joining together tens or hundreds of
thousands of cells can you begin to make headway against
such brute forces. About the same level of size is neces-
sary for any high degree of organization to be achieved.
Size also brings speed and power, and this is of advantage
in exploring more of the environment. But the effective
range (apart from involuntary floating with the wind or
the current) of any creature below about half a million
cells and a hundredth of a gram is extremely limited. Ants
with fixed nests make expeditions of several hundred
yards, and mosquitoes migrate for a mile or so. When we
get to whole grams, however, winged life at least has the
world before it. Many migratory birds that regularly
travel thousands of miles weigh less than ten grams.
Swimming life soon follows suit; think of the migrations
of tiny eels across the Atlantic, or of baby salmon down
great rivers. Most land life lags a little; though driver
ants are always on the move, and mice shift their quarters
readily enough, controlled migration hardly begins in land
animals till weight is reckoned by the pound.

If a certain size is needed for any degree of emancipa-
tion from passive slavery to the forces of environment, it is

146

THE SIZE OF LIVING THINGS

equally needed to achieve active control over them. Be-
fore anything worthy of the name of brain can be con-
structed, the animal must consist of tens of thousands of
cells. The insects with best-developed instincts run from
a milligram to a gram. But while a very efficient set of
instincts can be built up with the aid of a few hundred or
thousand brain-cells, rapid and varied power of learning
demands a far greater number. For instincts are based on
fixed and predetermined arrangements of nerve-paths,
while efficient learning demands the possibility of almost
innumerable arrangements. The facts are that no verte-
brates of less than several grams weight (such as small
birds) show any power of rapid learning, and none below
several ounces weight (such as rats) are what we usually
call intelligent, while even the smallest human dwarf has a
body-weight to be reckoned in tens of pounds. We are
far from knowing the precise size needed ; but the intelli-
gence of a rat would be impossible without brain-cells
enough to outweigh the whole body of a bee, while the
human level of intellect would be impossible without a
brain composed of several hundred million cells, and there-
fore with a weight to be reckoned in ounces, outweighing
the very great majority of existing whole animals. In any
case, a very considerable size was a prerequisite to the
evolution of the human mind.

Size too means a disregarding of obstacles : the rhino-
ceros crashes through the bush that halts and tangles man ;
the horse gallops over the grass that is a jungle to the ant.
Size may help to intimidate or to escape from enemies, or
may enable the carnivore to attack new and larger prey;
and it usually goes with longevity.

Size thus holds out many advantages for life. But size
H7

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

brings disadvantages as well as advantages, and so life
finally comes up against a limit of size, where disadvan-
tages and advantages balance.

The limits are different for different kinds of animals,
for they depend upon the construction of the type, and
upon the world which it inhabits. Single-celled animals,
as we have seen, soon reach a limit on account of the sur-
face-volume relation. Organisms that must swim and
have only cilia to swim with come to a limit even earlier.
Whether they be one- or many-celled, the limit is at about
a milligram. Those which use cilia, not to swim, but to
produce a food current, are not handicapped until much
later; by folding the current-producing surface, and ar-
ranging neat exits and entrances for the current, many
lamp-shells and bivalve molluscs reach several ounces; but
as the current-producing cilia are confined to a surface,
there comes a limit, which is attained when the soft parts
reach a weight of a few pounds.

With most slow-moving sea animals, it is the food ques-
tion which restricts size. It is usually more advantageous
to the race to have a number of medium-sized animals util-
izing the food available in a given area than to put all the
biological eggs into the single basket of one big individual.
Without some greater degree of motility than these pos-
sess, sea-urchins or sea-cucumbers as big as sheep would
be inefficient at exploiting the food resources of the neigh-
bourhood. The only such slow creatures above a few
pounds weight of soft parts are jellyfish, the largest of
which manage to obtain sufficient food in the crowded
surface waters of cold seas by spreading prodigious nets of
poisonous tentacles.

Insects and spiders have so low a limit of size because
148

THE SIZE OF LIVING THINGS

of their air-tube method of breathing, which is inefficient
over large distances. Crustacea are limited by their habit
of moulting. A crab as big as a cow would have to spend
most of its life in retirement growing new armour-plate.
Land vertebrates are limited by their skeleton, which for
mechanical reasons must increase in bulk more rapidly
than the animal’s total bulk, until it becomes unmanage-
able. And water animals are presumably limited by their
food-getting capacities.

VII

At last we come to the position of man, as a sizable ob-
ject, within the universe. Eddington begins his fascinat-
ing Stars and Atoms by pointing out that man is almost pre-
cisely halfway in size between an atom and a star.

“The sun belongs to a system containing some 3000 million
stars. The stars are globes comparable in size with the sun, that
is to say, of the order of a million miles in diameter. The space
for their accommodation is on the most lavish scale. Imagine
thirty cricket balls roaming the whole interior of the earth; the
stars roaming the heavens are just as little crowded and run as
little risk of collision as the cricket balls. We marvel at the
grandeur of the stellar system. But this probably is not the
limit. Evidence is growing that the spiral nebulae are ‘island
universes’ outside our own stellar system. It may well be that
our survey covers only one unit of a vaster organization.

A drop of water contains several thousand million million
million atoms. Each atom is about one hundred-millionth of an
inch in diameter. Here we marvel at the minute delicacy of the
workmanship. But this is not the limit. Within the atom are
the much smaller electrons pursuing orbits, like planets round the
sun, in a space which relatively to their size is no less roomy than
the solar system.

Nearly midway in scale between the atom and the star there is
149

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

another structure no less marvellous — the human body. Man is
slightly nearer to the atom than to the star. About io 27 atoms
build his body; about io 28 human bodies constitute enough ma-
terial to build a star.”

We can pursue this train of thought a little further.
The size-range of living beings, the amount by which the
big tree is bigger than the filter-passer, is io 24 ; in other
words, the biggest single organism is a quadrillion times
larger than the smallest. Among different phyla only one
has a range over half as great, and this is the unexpected
group of the Protozoa. Molluscs and coelenterates have
a range of io 11 , and vertebrates, arthropods, and worms
one of io 10 — ten thousand million. Echinoderms have
only a range of a million times, rotifers even less. As
proof of how soon the size of insects and of flying birds is
cut short, we find they have ranges of only a million and
ten thousand, respectively.

Man is a very large organism. During his individual
existence he multiplies his original weight a thousand
million, and comes to contain about a hundred million
million cells. He is a little more than halfway up the size-
scale of mammals, and nearly two-thirds up that of the
vertebrates.

Then we look at the range of life as a whole, and com-
pare it with the size-ranges of not-living objects above and
below the limits of living things; here too there are sur-
prises. The sun is almost precisely as much heavier than
a big tree as the big tree is heavier than the filter-passer;
but the range from the filter-passer downward to the ultim-
ate and smallest unit of world-stuff, the electron, is only
half this — only as much as from the big tree to such an
easily visible creature as the flea. It takes more tubercle

150

THE SIZE OF LIVING THINGS

bacilli to weigh one man than there are electrons in a
tubercle bacillus.

It is possible to calculate, on the Einstein hypothesis, a
minimum weight for the whole universe, a minimum
figure for the totality of matter. This is nearly io 24 times
as much as the sun — in other words, the sun is halfway
between the big tree and the whole universe of size.

Although the molecules of living matter are, for mole-
cules, enormous, yet the smallest living organisms are far
down on the world's size-scale. Once started, however,
life has achieved a size-range which is two-fifths of that
from electron to star, and probably well over a quarter of
the whole range of size within the universe. Man is
almost halfway between atom and star; he is nearly two-
fifths up the cosmic scale from electron to the all-embrac-
ing weight of the universe. But so vast is that scale that
to be halfway up he would have to be as big as a million
big trees rolled into one. Even if we were to take the
thousand million people who now inhabit the globe as con-
stituting but one single organism, this would still be more
than ten times too small. The individual man is all but
halfway between atom and star; humanity entire stands
in the same position between electron and universe.

THE ORIGINS OF SPECIES

P rofessor punnett once wrote that Darwin’s great
work had in point of fact been instrumental in de-
flecting attention away from the question of the origin of
species and canalizing it into the broader problem of
large-scale evolution. To-day, after eighty years, the
species problem has come to the forefront of biological
research. This is due partly to the progress of systematics
itself, the amassing and analysis of detailed collections of
animals and plants from every region, and partly to the
rise of new branches of biology, such as genetics, cytology,
and ecology, which are illuminating the problem, often
from unexpected angles.

If Darwin were alive to-day, the title of his book would
have to be not the ‘Origin,’ but the ‘Origins of Species.’
For perhaps the most salient single fact that has emerged
from recent studies is that species may arise in a number
of quite distinct ways.

From another angle, we may say that the study of species
is turning into the study of evolution in action. Large-scale
evolution we can only deduce, or at best follow on its vast
time-scale with the aid of fossils ; but small-scale evolution
is proceeding here and now, and lies open to analysis with
the aid of the tools of modern research. We can hope for
new facts and generalizations from its study, whereas it is
unlikely that any further important principles concerning
large-scale evolution remain to be brought to light.

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THE ORIGINS OF SPECIES

Past students of the problem have pointed out with
justice that the differentiation of new species depends on
three factors — variation, selection, and isolation. Varia-
tion furnishes the raw material, the building-blocks of
evolution; selection is the guiding and shaping agency;
and isolation provides the barriers which allow forms to
separate and diverge. But until recently these terms were
largely covers for our ignorance. This was notably so in
regard to variation, since until well into the present cen-
tury little was known as to how organisms varied, and
even as to what types of variation could be inherited. To-
day, however, we would include under this head the
nature of the hereditary mechanism and of its modes of
change; and our new knowledge here has led to new
results, some of them of great importance.

It is common knowledge now that the machinery of
heredity is provided by the chromosomes of the cell
nucleus. These exist in each species in a definite number,
one half derived from the male parent, the other half from
the female. Furthermore, each kind of chromosome has
its own individuality, consisting of a large number of
hereditary units or genes, arranged in a definite linear
order. The genes, to use an old metaphor, are the cards
with which the organism has to play the game of life; and
normally each animal or plant has two complete packs of
these genetic cards, one from its father and one from its
mother.

The genes are alive in the sense that they are self-repro-
ducing (or at least self-copying). Normally a gene per-
sists in the same form from generation to generation.
Occasionally, however, a change occurs in the gene — it
mutates, as we say in technical parlance, and then it per-

153

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

sists in its new altered form until a fresh mutation occurs.
Thus each kind of card may exist in a number of sub-
kinds, each sub-kind having a slightly different effect on
its possessor: changing the colour of its eyes, reducing
its fertility, increasing its resistance to cold, modifying
the shape of its limbs, and so forth.

The sexual process shuffles and re-deals these cards so
that every possible combination of the different types can
be realized. This is one of the fundamental facts dis-
covered by Mendel.

With this brief preamble, let us look at one or two
aspects of recent work on the species problem. One of
the most startling facts, which would have been regarded
as impossible by earlier generations of biologists, is that
new species may arise suddenly, at a single bound. This
depends on another property of the hereditary machinery.
Normally, when a cell divides, its chromosomes all split
lengthwise and the halves separate, so that each daughter-
cell receives a complete set. Occasionally, however,
though the chromosomes split, the cell misses a division,
so that it and its descendants have double the normal
number of chromosomes.

Now consider what happens if two distinct species
cross. Their offspring contain two packs of chromo-
somes; but these, even if of the same number in each
pack, are in most cases so dissimilar that when the time
comes to sort them out so that each reproductive cell
contains a single pack, with one of each kind of chromo-
some instead of a pair, they are incapable of executing
the very precise manoeuvres needed to effect this properly.
Accordingly, the reproductive cells receive too many of
some chromosomes, too few of others, and the result is

i54

THE ORIGINS OF SPECIES

complete (or in some cases almost complete) sterility,
either through the failure of the reproductive cells to
form at all, or to function properly if formed, or to pro-
duce a normal individual if they should manage to
unite.

But if the chromosomes have been doubled, then each
can find a mate like itself; the microscopic manoeuvres
can take place according to the rules, and the organism is
fertile. What is more, it is now largely or wholly sterile
with either of its two parent species, as the offspring from
such a cross will have three instead of two of each chromo-
some in one set, and this again upsets the manoeuvres
of sorting-out during the formation of the reproductive
cells.

Quite a number of new species are now known which
have originated in this way, some produced experiment-
ally and some found in nature. They may even be more
successful than their parents. This is the case with the
rice-grass Spartina townsendii which is used by the Dutch
to reclaim land from the sea: it resulted from a cross be-
tween a European species and an American one accident-
ally brought over by shipping.

So far, all the examples of such sudden species are from
plants. It would probably be impossible for the process
to occur in higher animals because of their special method
of sex-determination, which would not work if the number
of chromosomes were doubled.

Chromosome-doubling after crossing is a method of
species-formation in which the isolation is not spatial but
genetic — the barrier between the new form and the old is
provided by a change in the microscopic machinery of
inheritance, which prevents fertile crossing. Nor has

i55

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

selection played a part in modelling the new type. It
arises suddenly and stands or falls on its intrinsic merits.

Other changes sometimes take place in the genetic
machinery that may assist in isolating new types, though
the isolation is not so complete. For instance, a consider-
able section of one chromosome may become inverted end-
to-end, so that the genes it contains are now in reversed
order. When this happens, the genes in the inverted
section cannot be recombined freely with the correspond-
ing genes in normal chromosomes. Thus this section of
the germ-plasm of the species is effectively divided into
two parts, which must remain isolated from each other in
subsequent evolution, even if the species itself remains
single. However, if there should subsequently arise
mutations which reduce the fertility of crosses between
the type with the inverted and that with the normal un-
inverted section, the species may split into two.

Accordingly, such accidents to the chromosomes, while
not immediately producing new or even incipient species,
may pave the way for species-splitting later, in the same
sort of way as is done by geographical isolation of a popu-
lation on an island or a mountain-top.

Other similar rearrangements of the chromosome ma-
chinery may occur. For instance, a bit of one chromo-
some may become detached and then attached to a different
kind of chromosome. Such accidents, each in their own
special way, may provide partial isolation and pave the
way for species-splitting. This sort of thing seems to
occur in many animals. Certainly the little fruit-fly, Dro -
sophila , which has yielded more information on heredity
than probably all other organisms lumped together, is
very prone to such happenings. The numerous different

156

THE ORIGINS OF SPECIES

species of Drosophila are all characterized by such internal
rearrangements of the chromosomes, and in many cases
the rearrangements are both numerous and far-reaching.

Some Species of Drosophila are so alike to look at that it
was only their sterility on crossing which led to the dis-
covery that they were separate species. In all such cases,
accidents seem to have occurred to the chromosome ma-
chinery, providing some initial degree of genetic isolation
to form a partial barrier between the two different stocks.

Another quite different type of barrier is that provided
by ecological isolation, when groups are divided by differ-
ences in their habits or habitats. The best-analysed cases
concern what are called ‘biological races ’ of parasites
adapted to different hosts, or of plant-eating insects
adapted to different food-plants. At the outset, such
groups seem to be held apart rather incompletely by
accidental experience. The moth that has lived on a plant
of kind A as a grub will generally prefer to deposit its eggs
on a plant of the same kind instead of on a plant of kind B.
Mutations crop up later and are incorporated into the
animal’s inheritance, giving it an instinctive preference
for one or the other food-plant; still later other mutations
give it an instinctive aversion to mating with an individual
of the other race. The further the process goes, the more
will selection encourage such mutations, for if each race is
nicely adjusted to its particular food-plant, any mixture
of the two races will be less closely adapted, and will there-
fore be at a disadvantage.

Once the isolation is fairly complete, other differences
can and often will accumulate, so that the two types, after
passing through a stage in which they are almost or quite
indistinguishable by appearance, though they behave as

i57

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

good species do by exhibiting sterility when crossed, can
be visibly separated as well.

Undoubtedly this sort of process, on a broader basis, has
operated extensively in nature. F.or instance, in Lake
Baikal the water-shrimps of the sandhopper family exist
in numerous species unknown elsewhere in the world,
some adapted to life in the open water and others to the
depths, as well as to various more ordinary habitats; and
there can be no question but that they have all diverged
in situ from some one or two ancestral forms. The same
sort of thing is often found on oceanic islands — as witness
the mocking-birds of the Galapagos. Incipient stages in
the process are also known, as with certain North Ameri-
can mice, where two distinct races are found in the same
geographical region but in different habitats, one in wood-
land, the other in open country. Here the two forms are
still merely subspecies, capable of fertile interbreeding if
confined together, but kept apart in nature by the invisible
barrier of their ecological preferences.

Finally, there remains the geographical type of isola-
tion, in which the barrier between groups is provided by
geographical features, like rivers, mountain ranges, or
stretches of sea for land forms, stretches of land for water
forms. The results of this sort of isolation have been the
most thoroughly investigated, and are in many ways of
great interest. One fact that has long struck systematists
has been the much greater amount of divergence achieved
on small islands as compared to large continental areas,
even when the differences in environmental conditions
are smaller. Thus there are almost as many different
races of lizards in the Adriatic as there are islands, while
on the neighbouring mainland the species is uniform over

158

THE ORIGINS OF SPECIES

large stretches. Again, the common wren remains the
same throughout Great Britain and all the mainland of
western Europe. But on the islands off Scotland differ-
entiation has set in. The Shetlands boast one quite dis-
tinct type, St Kilda a second, and the Faeroes yet another.

This excessive differentiation of isolated populations
(the same thing happens in fish, as in the char of isolated
lakes) has until recently remained as an empirical fact for
which no adequate explanation was forthcoming. A few
years ago, however, Professor Sewall Wright of Chicago
showed that it was to be expected as a consequence of
Mendelian inheritance. The mathematical reasoning in-
volved is too complex to set forth here. But the results
are simple enough. Briefly, if isolated populations are
small enough in numbers, then mere chance will step in
and largely override the effects of selection. New muta-
tions or new recombinations of old genes will often be-
come established even if they are not advantageous, and
in some cases even if they are slightly disadvantageous.
The result is to promote divergence which is non-adaptive
and, biologically speaking, accidental and irrelevant. An
analysis of the Adriatic lizards mentioned above has con-
firmed these deductions in a very pretty way. Other
things being equal, their degree of difference from the
mainland form is greater when the islands they inhabit
are smaller. This is to be expected, since the effects of
chance will increase as the size of the group goes down.

However, even on large continental masses some differ-
entiation may take place, with mere distance and differ-
ence in climatic conditions as the isolating factors. The
majority of widespread small birds and mammals, for
instance, can be classified into distinctive subspecies, each

159

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

with its own area of distribution. In many cases the pro-
cess has gone further and split an originally single group
into two or more 'good* species. An excellent example
is that of the eastern and western European tree-creepers.
While separated by the Ice Age, they diverged to such
an extent that even though they now overlap in central
Europe, they never interbreed.

Subspecies often interbreed freely where their areas
touch, but the zones of mixture are almost always con-
fined to narrow belts. This is at first sight puzzling.
Why, if they meet and interbreed, is there not a continu-
ous gradation from one extreme to the other, instead of
two more or less stable subspecies separated by a narrow
zone ? Why is there not a smooth slope instead of a stair-
case of change P Here again genetics provides the prob-
able answer. The two subspecific types are adaptive, not
only in their relations to the outer world but in their
internal constitutions. They differ in a considerable
number of genes, and each set of genes forms a harmoni-
ous stabilized whole, adapted to give the maximum vigour
and viability in the circumstances. When they meet,
they can still interbreed. But as a result of their inter-
breeding, the harmonious constellations of genes are
taken apart and recombined in all sorts of ways, which
will almost invariably be less favourable than the two
parent combinations. Thus, by adverse selection, the
new combinations will be prevented from spreading and
the mixed zone will be kept narrow.

Subspecies have often been stated to be species in the
making. Undoubtedly many of them are. But, equally
undoubtedly, many of them are not. Many widespread
species are permanently divided into a number of these

160

THE ORIGINS OF SPECIES

partially isolated subspecies, still exchanging a few genes
with each other by interbreeding, but each relatively stable
on the whole. And this condition, as Professor Wright
has shown, is the most favourable one for rapid evolution.

It appears that there are two positions of relatively
stable equilibrium in the process of evolutionary diverg
ence. There is the stage of species or of complete bio-
logical discontinuity, and there is the stage of interbreed-
ing subspecies or of partial biological discontinuity.

Finally, we must remember that in most cases, both
subspecies and species are adaptive, in the sense that they
are adjusted, often very closely, to their way of life or to
the climatic conditions of their environment. Even when
their visible characters do not seem adaptive, experiment
shows that selection has been at work upon their invisible
but much more important physiological characters, such
as temperature-resistance, ductless glands, or metabolism.

We are now in a position to view the species problem
in rather a new light. In the animal kingdom alone,
about a million distinct species are already known, and
the number is being increased every year by ten thousand
or so new ones as the result of new exploration and dis-
covery. Here is indeed an astonishing diversification of
life. How is it related to the broad processes of long-
range evolution ? The answer seems to be that it is largely
independent of them, or irrelevant.

Long-range evolution, guided by selection, produces
divergent specialization of types over tens of millions of
years: the placental mammals, for instance, gradually
radiated out into carnivores and insectivores, bats and
ungulates, rodents, cetaceans and primates. It leads to
the widespread extinction of older types and their replace-

161

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

ment by new types which radiate and specialize in their
turn. It leads, in a few and ever-lessening number of
lines, to true evolutionary progress.

Superposed on this, selection also sees to it that each
type becomes adapted to different climates and to minor
differences in habitat and environment. The garment of
life in which the globe is clothed is thus adjusted in detail,
as a suit of clothes is fitted by a tailor to the peculiarities
of a client.

But on these processes of adjustment and progressive
adaptation, major and minor, a series of discontinuities is
superimposed. The cloth of life is divided up into a mass
of snippets. Partly this discontinuity is imposed by
accidents of the outer world. A mountain range or an
arm of the sea produced by subsidence, an ice age or
other geographical event, separates populations. Other
groups are isolated by ecological accidents, in the shape
of differences between habitats — woodland and open
country, pond and swamp, high ground and low ground.
But partly the discontinuity is imposed by accidents of
the organism’s internal constitution — by doubling of the
whole chromosome-complement, by inversion or trans-
, location of chromosome-sections, by the development of
harmoniously stabilized gene-combinations which auto-
matically restrict the spread of other combinations. And
finally the two agencies may co-operate, as when geo-
graphical barriers isolate small populations, and then use-
less accidental characters automatically accumulate.

The result is that life finds its expression in the form of
almost innumerable separate groups, some fully separate,
like good species, some on the way to full separation, like
geographically isolated subspecies, some at the halfway

162

THE ORIGINS OF SPECIES

equilibrium point of partial separation, like continental
subspecies still interbreeding at their margins.

It is quite irrelevant to the slow processes of.long-range
evolution whether the European tree-creepers should
exist in the form of one or of many species. Owing takhe
accident of the Ice Age, they happen to exist as two species
It is equally irrelevant that the lizards of the Adriatic
should have become divided into a large number of sub-
species : they owe this to the geographical accident of the
submergence of a mountainous coast with- the resultant
formation of many small islands.

Evolution in the broad sense consists of a few kinds of
long-range trends. But these are cut up by isolation into
species and subspecies, whose enormous numbers bear no
relation to the major underlying trends. And even the
adaptive nature of these small units is largely obscured by
the frills and furbelows of non-adaptive accident which
can lodge in these discontinuous group-units — mere di-
versification abundantly but meaninglessly superposed on
the adaptive meaning and slow advance of life.

VII

MICE AND MEN

E arly in 1927 the newspapers contained accounts of
the havoc being wrought in California by field-mice.
These little creatures, increasing beyond all ordinary
bounds, had forced themselves by sheer quantity upon the
notice of man. In ordinary seasons they levy a modest
toll on the fruits of the earth, wild and cultivated — a toll
scarcely noticed by the farmer, still less by the community
at large. In this year and region, however, they had be-
come a grave menace to agriculture, and the resources of
the state were being mobilized against them.

A similar plague occurred on the other side of the
Atlantic in 1892-93. In Scotland during that season vast
hordes of field-mice ravaged the farms and again became
such a serious pest that they were deemed worthy of a
Government investigation. In this Scottish plague the
mouse mainly responsible was the short-tailed field-mouse
or vole, Microtus hirtus. But other field-mice were ab-
normally abundant at the same time, such as the long-
tailed field-mouse and the bank-vole. This would indicate
at the outset that some general conditions in the season
were responsible for the sudden abundance, and not any
specific conditions favouring one kind of mouse only.

These plagues are accompanied by great gatherings of
birds which prey upon the mice. In 1892 large numbers
of kestrels and still larger numbers of short-eared owls
assembled at the feast, though by what means they received

164

MICE AND MEN

intelligence of it is a mystery. So great was the supply of
food that the owls prolonged their breeding season right
into November, and even then produced broods much
larger than the normal.

In a mouse plague which occurred in Nevada in 1907
three-quarters of the alfalfa acreage of the state was de
stroyed. The whole ground, for square mile after square
pile, was riddled with mouse-holes till it was like a sieve.
It was estimated that the several thousand mouse-eating
birds and mammals busily gorging on mice in the affected
district were killing over a million mice a month; and yet
the numbers of the mice continued to increase in spite of
this toll.

Why these sudden outbursts of generative energy on
the part of rodents ? That is a problem for animal ecology,
the branch of biology which might be called scientific
natural history — the study of animals in nature and their
relations with their environment and with other animals
and plants. The first thing the ecologist discovers is
that the plagues are not such isolated phenomena as at
first sight might appear. They are merely exaggerations
of one part of a regular cycle. All small rodents (not at
present to go beyond this group) appear to have the life
of the species strung on a curve of numerical ups and
downs, a cycle of alternating abundance and scarcity.
Field-mice in England, for instance, have their ups every
three or four years. There was a moderate degree of
abundance in 1922, and again in 1926.

The best known of all such cases of cyclical abundance,
however, is the lemming of Scandinavia, which has be-
come almost mythical. In the sixteenth century, this
animal was reported ‘by reliable men of great probity* to

165

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

fall down from the sky in huge numbers during storms of
rain. The truth is not much less remarkable. The Euro-
pean lemmings live on the mountains in southern Scan-
dinavia (and, farther north, at sea-level on the treeless
tundra). Every few years they become enormously abun-
dant in their mountain homes, and set off upon a strange
migration. They move off in all directions downhill from
the mountains, crossing roads and rivers and railways on
their march. If they reach the seacoast they start to swim
out to sea, and swim until they drown. After a lemming
march the beach will be strewn with lemming corpses.
But it is not only drowning and the accidents of the route
which kill off the little creatures. Epidemics always seem
to break out in years of abundance and slaughter thou-
sands. The animals which migrate are almost exclusively
young animals. The old ones stay at home, on their
breeding-grounds; but there they too may succumb to
the spread of the epidemic. These years of over-popula-
tion occur with considerable regularity, and not only with
regularity, but with the same rhythm as that which char-
acterizes the rhythm of abundance in British field-mice.
The average length of the cycle in both kinds of animals
is close to three and a half years.

But the lemming introduces us to another fact of very
great interest. Lemmings occur not only in Europe but
also in Greenland and Canada. Here too there are years
of abundance and of dearth, and the cycle appears to be
the same or nearly so in both continents. Causes are at
work which are simultaneously influencing the little rat-
like animals on the Barren Grounds of Canada and in the
mountains of southern Norway.

Before going further in our analysis it will be well to

1 66

MICE AND MEN

remind ourselves that many other kinds of animals show
the same sort of cyclical rise and fall in numbers. The
year 1927 was of interest to English ornithologists
because it witnessed a considerable irruption into Eng-
land of that remarkable bird, the crossbill, with its mand-
ibles crossed over each other for the purpose of feeding
upon pine-cones. These irruptions come westward from
the pine-forests of central Europe, and occur at more or
less regular intervals. One, in the sixteenth century,
brought prodigious numbers of the birds, which did great
damage, since they discovered that their beaks were admir-
ably adapted for slicing apples in half as well as for obtain-
ing the seeds from pine-cones. The dates of crossbill
irruptions, however, have not been quite so well recorded as
those of two other kinds of birds, the Siberian nutcracker
and the sand-grouse. The nutcracker is an inhabitant of
the vast coniferous forests of Siberia. It has invaded
western Europe at intervals of eleven years, with what
would be extreme regularity if it were not for the fact that
now and again one of the invasions is ‘ skipped.’ Although
observations on the spot in Siberia are not forthcoming, it
appears almost certain that the migrations are due to over-
population in the bird’s natural home, coupled with a bad
harvest of the pine-cones upon which they feed. Doubt-
less, when the failure of the pine crop is less extreme than
usual, the pressure on population is not so great, and the
wave of migration spends itself before reaching Europe.

Pallas’ sand-grouse, on the other hand, is a bird of the
steppes and deserts of Central Asia, where it lives upon the
scanty vegetation of the salty soil. In every so many years
the bird leaves its home in huge flocks, migrating both
eastward into China, and westward into Europe, even as

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

far as the British Isles. Here again, a cycle of eleven years
is pretty closely adhered to, with the additional fact that
the alternate migrations are much bigger. As the records
go, we seem safe in prophesying the invasions at regular
intervals. The cause of the emigration again seems to
be relative over-population, or, what comes to the same
thing, food-shortage, owing to their food-plants being
covered by snow or heavy frosts.

The periodic migrations of locust and cricket swarms,
literally eating up the country in their advance, are well
known. Unfortunately a full analysis of them has not
yet been made. This is partly due to the fact that the
direction of insect-migration is entirely at the mercy of
the wind, and that a periodic increase of locusts in one
spot will cause emigration to various different countries
according to the accident of wind-direction. In addition,
insects, with their lack of a constant temperature, are more
likely than birds and mammals to show the effects of short
periods of very exceptional weather, less likely to sum up,
so to speak, the effect of moderate and irregular but long-
continued change. However, there seems little doubt
that investigation will reveal, in these and other insects,
such as the cockchafer, periodic cycles of abundance
similar to those found in birds and rodents.

However, the most remarkable facts on the problem of
periodic fluctuations in animal numbers are provided by
the books of the Hudson's Bay Company. This great
trading concern has kept records of the number of skins
of all the various kinds of fur-bearing animals brought in
each year by its trappers. The records show cycles of
abundance and scarcity in muskrat, Canadian rabbit or
varying hare, skunk, fisher, mink, wolverene, marten, lynx,

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MICE AND MEN

red fox, and arctic fox. The most spectacular changes,
perhaps, are to be noted with the Canadian rabbit ( Lepus
americanus). One year these animals will be enormously
abundant over vast areas of the continent. Next year an
epidemic will set in, and in the succeeding season a rabbit
will be a great rarity.

But more remarkable even than the change in abund-
ance is the regularity of the cycle. The Hudson’s Bay
record goes back to 1825. The record for annual number
of lynx skins, for example, when plotted as a graph, has
the regularity of a temperature chart. At about every
eleven years comes a peak, where the number of skins
brought in averages about 50,000 — always over 30,000,
and sometimes 70,000. Halfway between these peaks
are depressions, in which the average number of skins
sinks to well below 5000, occasionally approaching zero.
If records were available from single areas, the ups and
downs would be even more marked, for the maxima and
the sudden drops are not synchronous over the whole
continent, although they do not vary in any one locality
more than two or three seasons each way from the mean
for the whole continent.

Both lynx and rabbit have a cycle of just over eleven
years in length. The lynx eats the rabbit; and, accord-
ingly, the lynx’s maxima are one to two years later than
the rabbit’s.

Not merely are there more rabbits in existence at a
period of maximum abundance, but they are reproducing
faster. In bad years there will be only one brood in a
season, and about three young in a brood ; in very favour-
able years there will be two or three broods, and eight or
ten young in each brood. The Indian trappers are said

169

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

to prophesy the prospects of next season's rabbit crop by
counting the number of embryos in this season's rabbits.
The same sort of thing occurs in field-mice in England,
as was first established by Mr C. S. Elton at Oxford;
though the number of young per brood is not increased
in favourable years, the number of months in the year
during which breeding animals are to be found is
markedly increased.

When the different records for all kinds of animals and
birds from all over the temperate regions are analysed, it
turns out that in most cases the average length of the cycle
of abundance is either just about eleven years, or else
one-third of this, namely about 37 years. But of course
a periodically fluctuating curve of abundance might be
due to two separate cycles interacting with each other.
By mathematical analysis, however, when such is the case,
the two components can be separated from each other.
When such analysis is applied to the Hudson's Bay re-
cords, it is found that in fact the curves for the numbers
of many animals are thus compound. Sometimes a curve
which clearly has maxima every eleven years will be re-
vealed as possessing in addition a minor rhythm of about
three and a half years. This, for example, is the case with
the red fox. On the other hand, the more northern arctic
fox has an obvious period of about three and a half years;
but when this is eliminated from the curve, lo and behold
a minor, but none the less definite, eleven-year cycle re-
mains. Is there any virtue in this period of eleven years ?
Every astronomer would at once exclaim 'sun-spots' ; for
the number of sun-spots visible on the sun's disc shows a
well-marked fluctuation, and this cycle, too, has a period
of just over eleven years. This cycle does, in fact, corre-

170

MICE AND MEN

spond with that of number in various animals, the sun-
spot minima about coinciding with the animals’ maxima.
What is more, the sun-spots do not always keep strictly
to their eleven-year period, but may anticipate or delay
matters by a year or so: and when this is so, the animals’
curve of abundance is usually found correspondingly/
shifted.

There is little doubt that spots on the sun have an
effect upon weather on the earth. They cause great mag-
netic storms; and, in addition, the amount of energy
radiated by the sun appears to be greater at sun-spot
maxima, less when sun-spots are few. One of the chief
facts of terrestrial climate which seems to be definitely
correlated with sun-spot number concerns the track of
storms. If the tracks followed by heavy storms are plotted
on a map, it will be found that, in North America for
instance, there is in any one year a zone along which the
majority of storms travel. Now this zone shifts up and
down with considerable regularity from year to year, re-
turning to the same position about every eleven years.
Such a shift in the storm-tracks will obviously mean a slight
shift of the margins of all the great climatic zones. It will
mean that there will be cycles of rainfall, some areas get-
ting more than the average every eleven years, while other
zones in the same years will be getting less than the aver-
age; and this, according to the careful investigations of
O. T. Walker, is what actually occurs. Such changes are
likely to have the most noticeable effect upon plants and
animals where conditions are difficult for life. For in-
stance, a small change in rainfall in a semi-desert region
will have much more effect than the same change in a well-

* 7 *

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

watered country; and quite small temperature changes in
the Arctic will have disproportionately large effects on the
animals and plants which live there.

The three and one-half year period, on the other hand,
has not so far been correlated with any meteorological
facts. This, however, need not surprise us. What the
meteorologist records are variations in single factors of
climate such as temperature, rainfall, sunshine, and some-
times humidity. It is by no means likely that any one of
these by itself is going to be the main factor responsible
for the abundance or scarcity of a plant or animal. It is
much more likely that what favours the growth of an
organism beyond normal will be a particular combination
of, say, temperature, moisture, and sunshine, probably no
single one of the factors at work being either at its maxi-
mum or its minimum. Something of the sort can often be
traced with life. For instance, the optimum geographical
zone for white men is one of moderate temperature,
moderate rainfall, moderate sunshine, and a good deal of
changeable weather: no extremes are involved in it.

Though the sun-spots undoubtedly affect the weather,
and so the growth of plants, the growth of small herbi-
vorous animals, and this in its turn the abundance of their
carnivorous enemies, the correlation of sun-spot cycles
with cycles of animal abundance is not fully proved.
The animal cycle may be an independent one, of slightly
shorter period.

In any case, the abundance of rodents is an indicator for
certain combinations of meteorological factors. The meteoro-
logists themselves have not yet invented any instrument
for recording these particular combinations of factors —
indeed, they would not have suspected their existence but

172

MICE AND MEN

for the facts unearthed by the biologist. The lemming or
the field-mouse or the Canadian rabbit is thus, from one
point of view, a sensitive meteorological instrument for
integrating and summating a number of different agencies
which affect the weather, and transmuting a particular
combination of them into an increase of numbers which
catches the eye of observant man.

That important biological and meteorological effects
are exerted by sun-spot cycles is rendered certain by cor-
roborative evidence from other quarters. Professors Hun-
tington and Douglass have examined the growth of the
big trees (Sequoias) of California, as recorded in the thick-
ness of their annual rings of wood. This biological record
goes back over three thousand years ; and in it they find a
quite definite eleven-year cycle corresponding perfectly
with the cycle in sun-spot numbers. Besides this, changes
in the mean level of various large lakes, notably Victoria
Nyanza, have been analysed and, as Brooks has shown,
here too a correlation is apparent between rise and fall of
water-level and increase and decrease of sun-spot number.
It may be noted that lake-level will not be dependent on
any single one of the factors usually measured by meteoro-
logists, but will represent a balance between precipitation
and evaporation, which latter in its turn will depend partly
on temperature and partly on humidity. The lake thus
integrates a number of weather components, as does an
organism.

In passing, it should be observed that the short-period
cycles, of three and one-half years, would be expected to
affect only small animals which reach maturity in a year or
less. Larger animals have lives which are too long to be
upset by such small cycles. In precisely the same way,

*73

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

the choppy little waves which are so unpleasant to the in-
mates of a row-boat have no effect upon the bulk of a liner.
Even the eleven-year cycles will have little effect upon
animals like deer or wild asses. There are indications of
fluctuations, however, in the larger herbivores, but these
are of much longer range, a fact which in itself makes it
more difficult to collect statistics on the subject.

It is of great interest to find that the beaver, almost alone
among the smaller fur-bearing mammals of Canada, shows
no periodicity in its numbers. This fact is doubtless to
be correlated with its remarkable mode of life. It lives,
not on short-lived herbs or grass, but on the bark of trees.
It constructs dams by which it regulates its water-supply;
and brings tree-trunks from considerable distances to
serve as food-stores. When the local supply of trees is
exhausted it migrates elsewhere. Since it lives in small,
isolated colonies, it does not suffer from widespread epi-
demics. Here we seem to have a good proof that the
fluctuations in numbers which affect other animals are not
due to mysterious cyclical fluctuations in the animal's
inherent reproductive capacities, but to a normal though
indirect action of climatic influences via the animal’s food,
its parasitic enemies, and so forth.

A great deal has been heard recently of this theory of
inherent or spontaneous changes in reproductive capacity,
apropos of the fall in the human birthrate which has been
so noticeable during the last half-century among most
civilized peoples ; and the upholders of this view attempt
to support their conclusions concerning man by referring
to the cycles obtaining in mice and lemmings. Far from
lending them support, however, the biological facts tell in
the opposite direction. We know of no single case of an

*74

MICE AND MEN

animal changing its reproductive capacity, whether num-
ber of broods per year, or number of young per brood, so
long as it is kept under really uniform conditions, while
we know of a great many cases in which improved condi-
tions of temperature, food, etc., do bring about an increase
in reproductive output.

As Sir William Beveridge has ably pointed out, there is
nothing in the fall of the human birthrate which cannot be
accounted for by increased prudence coupled with in-
creased practicability of contraceptive devices ; nor is there
anything, even in the most destructive plague of voles or
rabbits, followed by the most spectacular disappearance
of the marauders, which cannot be accounted for by causes
simpler and more familiar than an otherwise unknown
fluctuation in reproductive potency. Once conditions
such as food begin to favour a small herbivorous mammal,
the shortness of its life-span enables it to outrun the con-
stable of its carnivorous enemies, which are handicapped
through being of larger size, and so requiring longer to
complete each generation. However, as the density of
herbivore population increases, parasites will be able to
spread more rapidly from one individual to another.
Finally a density is reached at which some disease-germ
can pass from mouse to mouse with great rapidity, with
the result that a fulminating outbreak of disease occurs.
This violent outbreak of epidemic disease has been repro-
duced experimentally with mice. The same bacillus, the
same mice: but with one density of mouse population
there are only isolated cases of disease, while with five
times the density of population a devastating epidemic
breaks out. The same appears to be true for animals kept
under semi-artificial conditions for sporting purposes.

i75

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

For instance, the Commission appointed to investigate
grouse disease in- Britain came to the conclusion that the
mere fact of overstocking a moor would cause disease, by
permitting a normally innocuous coccidian parasite to
pass so rapidly and in such numbers from bird to bird that
mass-infection and consequent disease resulted.

It appears to be a constant rule that the rapid increase
consequent on outrunning larger, carnivorous enemies
always has as consequence the running into new conditions
more favourable to the invisible parasitic enemies of the
species. As a result, an epidemic follows, and the numbers
of the species are reduced below normal. This reduction
may then be carried still further by unfavourable seasons.

This has one interesting consequence of general bio-
logical interest. The evolutionist normally assumes that
the pressure of natural selection will be approximately
equal, in natural conditions, over long periods of time.
This may be so for animals like the beaver; but it will
clearly not hold for those like lemmings or field-mice. In
these, after a period of minimum numbers has been well
passed, and the animal is filling the empty landscape once
more under increasingly favourable conditions, natural
selection will clearly be much less intense than normal,
for there will be next to no competition due to population
pressure, and weather and food conditions will be more
favourable than normal. The shoe will pinch unusually
hard twice in each cycle— once when weather and food
conditions are most unfavourable, and once when the in-
evitable epidemic breaks out. Thus, as Elton puts it, the
animals will be subjected in each cycle to two severe exam-
inations of different type, while they will be hardly troubled
by schoolmistress Nature during the rest of the time.

176

MICE AND MEN

But when violent epidemics come, disease resistance
will indeed be at a premium, since only one in a thousand
or even one in a hundred thousand will survive, and from
those scattered survivors the whole species will be repro-
duced. That is natural selection with a vengeance.

Ill

Important consequences of another type flow from the
facts. If lemmings and rabbits and mice are killed off in
thousands by epidemics, may not rodent cycles bear some
relation to human disease ? The answer is not only that they
may, but that they do. Most people know now that bubonic
plague is spread to man from rats and other small rodents like
gerbils by means of the animals’ fleas. The years when the
small rodents in Central Asia or South Africa show maxima
in numbers the incidence of human plague increases.

After lemming migrations, visitations of disease are not
uncommon among the human populations of the Nor-
wegian valleys. The matter has not yet been properly in-
vestigated; but it is at least possible that some bacillus,
acquiring new virulence by its rapid passage through its
rodent victims, may produce this human disease. Hardly
any work has been done on the causes of these natural
epidemics of animals. The whole question would well
repay investigation, both on account of its intrinsic in-
terest, and because of its possible bearings on human health.

Immediate practical questions arise as to the means of
coping with the periodic pests as they arise. All kinds of
paradoxes here present themselves. The obvious course,
and that naturally enough demanded by the suffering
agriculturist, is the wholesale destruction of the voles or
mice which are taking toll of his crops. Destruction, how-

*77

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

ever, is often no easy matter. It is difficult to get at such
small creatures which live in holes, swarm in myriads, and
in a few weeks’ time are grown up and ready to reproduce
their kind. Both trapping and poison have their draw-
backs and defects. Furthermore, killing the animals once
they are so abundant that they are easy to kill is like lock-
ing the stable door after the horse has been stolen.

The bird-protectionist sees one step further. He re-
minds us that owls and many hawks prey upon small
rodents, and would have us keep down the mice and voles
by encouraging the predatory birds. But then steps in
the ecologist and points out that both human destruction
and avian enemies will have as their effect merely the slow-
ing down of the geometrical increase of the mice (for cer-
tainly not even the dense hordes of owls and kestrels in
1892 served actually to decrease the numbers of the voles,
and man’s methods have hitherto proved a good deal less
efficient than Nature’s); and all that this can be expected
to do is to delay the outbreak of the epidemic which alone
can reduce the creatures to manageable numbers.. The
ecologist, on the contrary, would prefer to try some method
which would actually encourage the multiplication of the
rodents in the hope that the epidemic would come sooner,
the agony would not be so prolonged, and the losses to
agriculture consequently not so great. As alternatives he
would suggest the effect of various bacterial cultures,
which might provoke an artificial epidemic at an earlier
stage of the cycle; or possibly some biological treatment
such as that proposed by Rodier for rats, of trapping, kill-
ing all the females captured, but releasing all the males,
in the hopes that the minority of females would be pestered
out of successful breeding.

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MICE AND MEN

Common sense, however, may rightly ask one or two
questions of the ecologist. It seems, for instance, to be a
fact that epidemics set in among mice in all years of maxi-
mum abundance, whether the over-population becomes
so intense as to constitute a real plague, or is so moderate
as to be noticeable only by the professional naturalist on
the lookout for such phenomena. How is it that the epi-
demic does not break out in the plague years as soon as
the population intensity attained at the ordinary maxi-
mum has been reached ? Clearly some other factor must
come in — possibly a time factor, or, what comes to much
the same thing, one involving the number of genera-
tions run through by one or all of the parasites of the
rodent.

What is clear, however, is that no quite simple, straight-
forward methods will serve. The biological thinking of
the man in the street — and of the professional biologist, too,
for that matter — is much too much obsessed by military
metaphor for him to be able yet to see quite straight on
ecological problems. He is brought up to believe in a
struggle for existence, which he envisages as a regular
battle between an inoffensive herbivore and its enemies, or
a sort of athletic competition between a carnivore and its
prey. In both cases he thinks of the struggle as some-
thing in which victory is to be achieved, as in war or sport.
As a matter of fact, it is nothing of the kind. A herbi-
vorous animal without carnivorous enemies would tend
to over-populate its territory, to be diseased and under-
nourished, even to condemn itself to starvation by eating
down its own food-supply; a carnivorous species which
was restricted to one kind of prey, and a kind which it
could too easily catch, would inevitably bring its own race

179

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

to extinction by eating itself out of hearth and home.
Both eventualities have, through the interference of man,
been realized. When red deer were introduced into New
Zealand they throve on the succulent forest and bush, and
multiplied exceedingly owing to the absence of all carniv-
orous enemies. But after a few decades they had changed
the face of the country where they were abundant, and to-
day the fine heads and heavy beasts are found only on the
outskirts of the deers’ range, where they are still advanc-
ing into virgin country. Elsewhere the herds are full of
stunted specimens and malformed antlers, and the authori-
ties have been forced to play the part of natural enemy, and
to adopt a rigorous policy of periodic thinning-out to save
the stock.

As an example of the opposite effect, I may quote from
Elton’s Animal Ecology the curious case of Berlenga Island,
off the coast of Portugal : ‘ This place supports a lighthouse
and a lighthouse-keeper, who was in the habit of growing
vegetables on the island, but was plagued by rabbits which
had been introduced at some time or other. He also had
the idea of introducing cats to cope with the situation —
which they did so effectively that they ultimately ate up
every single rabbit on the island. Having succeeded in
this, the cats starved to death, since there were no other
edible animals on the island.'

We are often told that it is very important for children
to select their parents wisely. It is becoming clear that a
wise choice of enemies is an asset to an organism 1 One
can hardly, perhaps, speak of an animal’s enemies as part
of its adaptations ; but at least they are vital to its survival.

180

MICE AND MEN

The fact is, of course, that in almost every case the word
‘enemy* is only applicable when we are thinking in terms
of individuals : as soon as we think of the species, the in-
dividual ‘enemy* usually turns out to be a racial benefactor.

The two things needful are patience and research —
patience in face of the popular demand for immediate
action which is raised every time a plague of mice or a
dearth of fish is experienced, and research to unravel the
excessively complicated threads of the web of life.

The picture gained by research looks something like
this, though we are not sure of the sun-spot influence on
certain animal cycles : — The fluctuation in the number of
sun-spots is probably connected with the distance of the
great planet Jupiter from the sun’s incandescent surface.
The sun-spot fluctuations change the tracks of storms,
brim and depress the waters of our lakes, alter our weather.
The weather-changes make the giant trees put on more
or less wood, promote the multiplication of rabbits, mice,
and lemmings, cause an alternation of fat and lean years in
the fur department of the Hudson’s Bay Company, inflict
periodic losses, through vole plagues, upon the world’s
agriculture. The multiplication of the rodents, besides
reverberating upon fox and lynx, hawks and owls, affects
our human health returns. Verily the dreams of astrology,
even if they suffered from the defect of not being true, had
at least the merit of simplicity in comparison with this web
of cosmic influence spinning out from one corner of the
solar system to another !

But the very complexity of what we do know, or can
reasonably surmise, bids us take an infinity of pains to
unearth the still greater complexities that are still hidden
from us, if we are to control nature efficiently. Modern

r8i

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

agriculture, with its massing of huge numbers of indi-
viduals of one species of plant or animal, is a deliberate
invitation to parasites and pests to revel in the unaccus-
tomed profusion. And when we come to tropical agri-
culture, we must remember that the tropical heat raises
the insect to be the equal in activity of the warm-blooded
mammal, including our own species. The mechanical
and chemical triumphs of the last hundred years must give
place in this century to biological triumphs of equal magni-
tude if man is to retain his dominant position on the earth.

Until synthetic chemistry has progressed a great deal
further, the control of the plant kingdom is man’s only
means of supplying himself with the bulk of the food and
the raw materials which he needs. The success of this
control, as more and more of the earth’s surface is given
over to such vegetable exploitation, will come to depend
more and more upon detailed knowledge about the animal
and plant enemies, actual or potential, of the crops. We
talk a great deal about safeguarding the food supply of
the country in time of war. In fifty years’ time we are
much more likely to be talking about safeguarding the
world’s food supply in time of peace. And we shall not
be looking to machinery for our safeguards, nor even to
light cruisers or other forms of naval strength, but to the
laboratories of entomology, mycology, and all the other
branches of pure and applied ecology.

THE WAY OF THE DODO

I n 1938, the British Sporting Exhibition was held at the
Imperial Institute. It is apposite to consider its subject-
matter biologically in the twofold aspect of destruction and
conservation. Speculative minds may wonder whether by
the year 2038 — or perhaps 3038 (a thousand years is of
little account in the flow of biological time)— any such
exhibition would be possible save as a museum record of
the past. For the wild life of the world, including its
game, big and small, has been diminishing with alarming
speed all through recorded history. Some species have
gone for ever; such are the dodo and the solitaire, the
quagga, the aurochs, the blauwbok, the moa, the passenger
pigeon, and the great auk. They are total losses: man
can destroy a species, but he cannot restore it.

Perhaps one should say he cannot in most cases restore
it; for the Germans have in the last decade produced a
‘synthetic* aurochs, a form reconstituted by crossing the
most primitive breeds of domestic cattle and selecting
those types whose conformation most nearly resembles
that of the original wild species. These resuscitated aur-
ochs are said to be almost as ferocious as their prototypes.
Such re-synthesis, however, is possible only with a wild
species which has left domestic descendants : it would be
a bold biologist who would undertake to produce a new
dodo from a pigeon or to revive the quagga from the horse
and zebra stock.

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Other species now exist only in captivity. Such are the
beautiful and fantastic white-tailed gnus (to be seen dis-
porting themselves at Whipsnade), or the wild horse,
Equus przcvalskii> identical with the horses depicted (and
eaten) by Solutrean man, the last remnants of which in a
wild state were killed off by bandits and deserters in Cen-
tral Asia after the war. Camels may perhaps be included
here — they exist only in domestication or as escapes from
it. Then there are the numerous creatures which would
have become extinct but for rigorous protection, and in
most cases exist only in special reserves — such as the
American and the European bison, the white rhinoceros,
the Tuatara ‘lizard* or Sphenodon , sole survivor of a whole
order of reptiles, the kiwi, the platypus, the pronghorn,
the Alaska fur-seal, or the giant tortoises of the Galapagos.
The gorilla, the orang-utang, the Komodo dragon, and
other creatures are on the margin of this category. Some-
times, even in spite of rigorous protection, the fate of a
species is still in the balance; this applies to the delightful
koala of Australia.

Many other species are in danger of extermination
owing to insufficient protection. The great whales are the
outstanding example. The concern of the British Govern-
ment over the problem has been shown by their arranging
for the series of valuable investigations carried out by the
research ship 1 Discovery.* With the advent of pelagic
whaling it seemed certain that, unless international regu-
lation of the industry were achieved, whales would cer-
tainly become exceedingly scarce, and some species might
be wiped out. It is therefore encouraging to know that an
international convention on the subject has just been con-
cluded, though our satisfaction is tempered by the war.

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THE WAY OF THE DODO

Again, the sea-otter has been so persecuted for its beautiful
pelt that it is on the verge of extinction, though a thriving
colony has just been discovered in California.

In certain ways more serious than the loss of a few
species, however beautiful or strange, is the general de-
crease of wild life all over the globe. Partly this is a mere
quantitative decrease in numbers. The game in South
Africa a century ago was more abundant than in the most
famous reserves of Central Africa to-day. Early settlers
in America found an abundance of bison, deer, duck, and
wild mammals and birds of every kind, which does not
exist to-day in any part of the United States, even in
reserves or national parks. The stories of the pioneers
read like fairy-tales or accounts of the Garden of Eden.
Even in the last fifty years the numbers of wild ducks and
geese and other migratory game-birds have declined so
rapidly as to give real cause for alarm.

Partly the decrease is a decrease of range due to local
extermination. Britain originally harboured as breeding
species bears, wolves, beavers, bustards, spoonbills, sea-
eagles, ospreys, ruffs, avocets. The kite was the chief
scavenger of medieval London ; now there are less than a
dozen specimens in Britain. The lion used to be found it\
parts of Europe and ranged all over the East. Now, apart
from a small area in India, it is confined to Africa.

A certain number of species, many of them undesirable
pests, have increased ; but in general it is all too true that
both the variety and the abundance of life, especially in its
larger and more striking manifestations, have decreased
enormously in the historic period, and that the decrease
has shown an alarming acceleration during the last hun-
dred years.

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Can anything be done to stop this trend before it is too
late? Must we reconcile ourselves to scenery robbed of
one of its major components (think of deer on the shoulder
of a Scottish mountain, antelopes and zebra in the sav-
annas of Africa, water-birds in the Camargue or the Naar-
demeer, cliff-breeders in St Kilda or the Fames, the circ-
ling birds of prey giving point to distance in India) ? Must
we confine our knowledge of animals to dead specimens in
museums instead of making the world a living museum ?

A certain number of achievements encourage hope. At
one time fewer than 1000 bison existed wild on the Ameri-
can continent: to-day there are several flourishing herds,
reproducing so well that the surplus must be periodically
killed. The beaver, thanks to protection, has reversed its
alarming decline in eastern America, and is now becoming
common; and the European beaver has been at least
saved from extinction. The egrets of the United States,
thanks to good laws and strong action, are on the increase.
International agreement saved the Alaskan fur-seal.

In fact we can do a great deal. We have realized that
the decline is almost wholly due to our own agency. Some
of the destruction is direct, some indirect. Direct de-
struction may be for commercial gain, as with whales,
egrets, or fur-bearers; or for sport, as of game; or in the
interests of sport, as of so-called 4 vermin * by gamekeepers;
or for the protection of crops or other assets, as of bull-
finches by fruit-growers, fish-eating creatures by fisher-
men, or elephants by the Governments of African colonies.
Indirect destruction may occur as the result of the ex-
tension of agriculture, as with the great bustard in this
country; by the draining of marshes for reclaiming land;
by the extension of building; by the disturbances unwill-

186

THE WAY OF THE DODO

ingly caused by tourists and others bent on enjoying the
countryside.

A final and frequent cause is the accidental or deliberate
introduction of alien species. We in Britain suffer from
the grey squirrel and have had to eradicate the muskrat.
But other countries have much more serious problems.
The unique marsupial fauna of Australia is in danger,
almost in its entirety, as the result of the introduction of
placental mammals, domestic, feral, and wild. The Gala-
pagos giant tortoises are now threatened chiefly by the
dogs, cats, and pigs introduced by man rather than by
man’s own destructiveness.

What can be done is manifold. Individuals can en-
courage birds around their homes and contribute to public
opinion. They can multiply their contribution to the
cause by joining one or other of the various societies con-
cerned with conservation. The societies can set aside
areas for sanctuaries, and can bring pressure to bear on
local, national, and international authorities to secure the
passing of proper legislation and the dedication of reserves
and national parks.

Some societies, like our Royal Society for the Preserva-
tion of Birds, are concerned with the preservation of one
type of animal in one limited region. They have done
much in purchasing sanctuaries for rare birds and securing
legislation for bird protection. Others, like the National
Trust, are concerned with all aspects of nature, but again
in a limited area. Apart from beautiful scenery and inter-
esting buildings, they own fine bird reserves such as
Blakeney Point and the Fame Islands. . Then there are
bodies such as the Fauna Society (or, to give it its full
name, the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the

187

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Empire) which deal with many types of animals over large
regions; and bodies with general aims such as ULAWS
(the University of London Animal Welfare Society); and
finally those with the whole world for their province, s\ich
as the International Office for the Protection of Nature.
This office operates through national committees, so that
British subjects interested in world-wide fauna preserva-
tion will do best by joining the Fauna Society. In recent
years this society has sent out special missions to survey
and report on the situation in various parts of the Empire
— Major Hingston to East Central Africa, Colonel Hay-
wood to West Africa, Captain Caldwell to the West
Indies, and Sir Thomas Comyns Platt to Malaya and
Ceylon.

In a recent number of its Journal the Fauna Society
exposes one of the numerous dangers to which big game
is exposed — a ‘safari service’ organized primarily for the
benefit of American ‘ sportsmen ’ : —

‘We can fix you up to a successful hunt — if you give us the
chance, and then do your part, or allow us to do the necessary,
in case you can’t stand the gaff or become a rotten shot.’ Bongo
are ‘difficult to get — but we get them.’ Leopards — ‘in case of
great urgency we can always get one with a trap-gun — if client
demands it.’

Meanwhile the world’s rhinos are being slaughtered be-
cause of the belief of Indians and Chinese in the aphro-
disiac qualities of their horns ; the whales are being dan-
gerously reduced to make big profits for their slaughterers ;
seabirds are being battered .and starved to death because
vested interests stand in the way of the compulsory fitting
of separators to oil-driven ships ; fashionable women are
still responsible for the death of some of the most beautiful

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THE WAY OF THE DODO

winged creatures in the world; Australian ‘opossums’ are
in danger of extermination for the value of their pelts;
sportsmen will not agree to an adequate close season to
keep up the numbers of wild-fowl; lizards and snakes are
being killed out for shoes.

Two types of measure are of vital importance for the
saving of the wild life of the world. One is the framing
and ratification of international conventions for the pro-
tection of the fauna of large areas. That for Africa has
already become operative; and it is hoped that later a
further international conference will be held in London
to discuss the possibility of extending the principles estab-
lished by the African Convention to India and southern
Asia. The other main measure is the establishment of
national parks. National parks differ from sanctuaries in
their size, and from game reserves in their permanence.
They are places where Nature, not man’s material inter-
ests, are paramount. Anyone who has seen Kruger Park
in South Africa or the Parc National Albert in the Belgian
Congo will take away with him an indelible impression of
the wonder of wild life, and will wish to help in preserving
more of it for future generations.

There are splendid national park systems in Canada and
the U.S.A., and isolated parks in many countries, such as
Switzerland, Italy, and Malaya. It is, however, urgent
that many more be created in the British Empire, notably
in Africa and in Britain itself. In Britain, apart from the
need of preserving areas such as Snowdonia, the Lakes, or
the Peak district for healthy recreation, the west coast of
Scotland provides admirable opportunities for creating a
national park for the preservation of the surviving rem-
nants of our larger fauna.

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THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS

W e men like to see animals courting. It amuses us
to see them thus imitating humanity, and throws
something at once romantic and familiar into those dumb
and hidden lives which they veil so closely from us. * One
touch of Nature makes the whole world kin/ we murmur,
and find a new pleasure in the hackneyed words. They
are really not quite apropos, however; for what we in our
heart of hearts mean to say is one touch of human nature.
Man is a vain organism, and likes to stand surrounded by
mirrors — magnifying mirrors if it be possible, but at any
rate mirrors. And so we read the ideas of our own mind
into the animals, and confidently speak of ‘suitors’ and
‘coy brides to be won’ and ‘jealous rivals’ and what not,
as if birds or even spiders or newts were miniature human
beings, in fancy dress no doubt, but with the thoughts
of a twentieth-century inhabitant of London or New
York.

Some of the more reflective, perhaps, may wonder how
far we are justified in our assumptions as to the motives
and meaning of animal courtship; while others, with
maybe some biological knowledge behind them, may try
to look at it all from the other side of the gulf between
man and beast, imagine how our own courtship would
look to an external and dispassionate intelligence, wonder
whether much of human behaviour had better not be in-
terpreted from the animal side rather than the animal’s

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THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS

from ours, and how much we are walled in by our bio-
logical heritage.

Animal courtship is an unfashionable topic among bio-
logists at present; and I do not exaggerate when I say that
it is also one on which both ignorance and prejudice pre-
vail. My own real interest in the subject began when, one
spring in Wales, I observed the beautiful courtship of the
redshank, a common shore bird, and when I got back to
libraries, could find no ordered account of it, or indeed of
bird courtship in general. And now, after some twenty-
five years of reading and thinking about the subject, inter-
spersed with a number of pleasant if strenuous holidays in
Britain, in Louisiana, in Holland, in Spitsbergen, trying
to find out what really does happen with this or that com-
mon bird, I can confidently assert that Darwin’s theory of
sexual selection, though wrong in many details, yet was
essentially right : that there is no other explanation for the
bulk of the characters concerned with display, whether
antics, song, colour, or special plumes or other structures,
than that they have been evolved in relation to the mind of
the opposite sex ; that mind has thus been the sieve through
which variations in courtship characters must pass if they
are to survive.

Down at the base of the animal scale courtship of course
does not exist. Jellyfish or sponges or sea-urchins simply
shed their reproductive cells into the water and trust to
luck for fertilization. It is only when male and female
must actually co-operate for fertilization to be effected,
that we can expect to find courtship; and even so it will
not exist unless there is a fairly elaborate brain and nervous
system.

Perhaps the first adumbration of courtship is seen in the

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

nuptial dances of certain marine bristle-worms (Poly-
chaetes), in which at certain seasons of the year and phases
of the moon the creatures swim up out of their crannies in
the rocks and gather in groups, excited males wriggling
round the females. It is possible that the presence of the
dancing males in some way stimulates the females to lay
their eggs, upon which the male elements are discharged
in milky clouds. Snails too have a primitive courtship,
which is complicated by the fact that they are bi-sexual
and each in its role of male attempts to stimulate the other
in its role of female.

But the first actions to which the name courtships and
not merely perhaps direct stimulus to fertilization, must
be given are those of a few crabs and most spiders. Among
the crustaceans, the fiddler-crab is characterized by the
presence in the male of one enormously enlarged claw,
which may weigh almost as much as the rest of the body,
and is often brightly coloured. It used to be supposed
that with this the males stopped their burrows, or fought
other males, or seized and carried off the females. How-
ever, the careful studies of Dr Pearce show that its main
function is one of display. In the mating season, when a
female comes past, the males throw themselves into a tip-
toe attitude, with big claw rigidly held aloft. If the female
takes no notice, the male runs again to where she can see
him, and again strikes the statuesque pose : if she goes too
far, he returns to his burrow. The observer summed up
his impressions thus : ‘ One could only say that the males
appeared to be displaying their maleness.’

There we have the clue to the origins of courtship in a
nutshell. Once the brain reaches a certain complexity, it
controls behaviour. A crab can react to various situations

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THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS

— a food-situation, a hunger-situation, a fear-situation, a
sex-situation; and the statuesque male with his uplifted
claw is the sign and symbol of the sex-situation, just
as the coming of a man or other large animal among
the burrows constitutes an enemy-situation, with resultant
scuttling. Doubtless even without such male advertise-
ment, mating would eventually occur; but, as Darwin
so clearly saw, the advantage may be to the male and
not to the race — the male who did not display him-
self as such would not get mated and would leave no
descendants.

In the spiders, we find a very interesting difference
between the hunters and the web-spinners. Among the
former, who catch their prey by sight and stalking, males
perform strange dances before the females, and often have
the parts they thus display brightly coloured. The latter
are almost blind; and in them there are no dances, but
the male comes up to the web of the female and vibrates
one of the threads in a special manner, quite different
from the vibrations made by trapped prey. In both cases
it seems clear that the courtship’s primary function is
to indicate the existence of a ‘sexual situation.’ But here,
to do so is a good deal more important than in the
crab, for all the evidence goes to show that if this in-
dication were not made, the female would simply treat
the male like any other small living object, and eat
himl In many species she actually does so after the act
of mating (and this occurs too in the scorpions); and in
some others she is definitely hostile at first, while the male,
who is usually much smaller than she is, is always obvi-
ously very ready to run away during the early phases of
courtship.

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

In one hunting spider the male offers the female a nice
fly, neatly wrapped in silk. If put in a box by himself
with a fly, he will eat it; but if with a fly and a female, he
will wrap and offer it; and if in a box from which a female
has recently been removed, and in which her odour still
presumably lingers, he will still wrap it, and search, like
Shelley with his bouquet, ‘That he might there present it!
— Oh, to whom?’

In the carnivorous flies of the family Empidae , strange
developments of the love-gift have taken place. In some
species the male offers an unadorned carcass to the female.
In others, however, the prey is stuck in the front end of a
glistening ‘ balloon,' made of bubbles of viscous liquid
secreted by the male, larger than his own body, and
carried in his legs as he flies to and fro; doubtless this
makes the ‘sexual situation' more conspicuous from afar.
Finally, in a few species there has been a refinement.
The balloon is there, but prey is no longer carried in it;
instead, the males stick a leaf or flower-petal in it — and
indeed they will dart down and pick up any small con-
spicuous objects, such as fragments of paper, that you
may choose to sprinkle on the surface of the water over
which they hover. Here, in quite a different evolutionary
line from our own, we find quite definitely the employment
of a non-utilitarian ‘present' as gift from male to female.

When we come to the vertebrates, matters become even
more interesting, for it is among them, especially in the
birds, that courtship and display reach their highest elab-
oration. Only in a few fish is there much of a courtship,
as would be expected from the fact that most species pro-
duce large numbers of eggs which are only fertilized after
laying. The frogs and toads that make night pulse with

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THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS

sound in the warm regions of the earth use their voices,
as do the grasshoppers their legs or wings, in the interests
of reproduction; and if the grasshoppers were life’s first
instrumentalists, the frogs were the first vocalists.

The male frog, however, merely broadcasts an adver-
tisement of his presence; it is among the tailed amphib-
ians that true display is found. Our common newts in the
breeding season take to the water and develop a high fin
all along the back and tail. This is much larger in the
males, who in addition change their winter livery for one
of brighter colours. They may also be seen performing
their courtship — actively moving in front of the females,
often scraping up against them, all the time vibrating the
bent tail. The strange fact about this procedure, however,
is that they do not begin their display until after they have
emitted their fertilizing elements. These are deposited on
the bottom of the pond or aquarium inside a special packet
or spermatophore, which the female must pick up for
fertilization to occur; and courtship begins when this
deposition is completed.

Here we see that display may have a racial function,
adjuvant to successful fertilization, and not an affair be-
tween rival males. For even the most hardened Darwin-
ian would hardly maintain that a female, if two males
simultaneously deposited spermatophores and then began
their display before her, would be able to remember
which male had deposited which spermatophore even were
she to be better pleased or more stimulated by the display
of one rather than of the other ; and of course unless the
approved male were also to be the father of the young, his
pleasing of the female could have no evolutionary effect.
No: it seems clear that here the function of display has

195

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

again to deal with the ‘sexual situation’; with the differ-
ence that it is not merely to advertise the male’s presence
and masculinity, but to generate a sexual situation in the
mind of the female. As a matter of fact, Finkler has by
experiment shown that in the absence of a male’s display,
the female will not pick up spermatophores, so that this
conception of courtship’s function being to facilitate fertil-
ization via the mind, by stimulating the mental mechanism
into the right phase, seems justified.

There is one species of bird for which Darwin’s original
theory has been definitely shown to hold good. That is
the well-known shore bird, the ruff {Machetes). In the
winter the sexes are only to be told apart by size, but in
the breeding season the males grow a magnificent ruff —
a tippet or collar — round the cheeks and neck, and two
fine ear-tufts above. What is more, it is hard to find two
males alike; not only do they develop different ground-
colours in their plumage, but the collar and ear-tufts may
either or both be of some special colour or marking, one
black, the other white ; or chestnut, pepper and salt, buff,
sandy, grey, sepia, and what not. Arrived at their breed-
ing places, the males assemble at a definite spot, usually
known as a ‘hill,’ though it may be but a dry area in the
marsh. The females visit the hill from time to time, but
the males never go near the nests out in the marshes, nor
take any share in brooding or the cares of the young. On
the hill each male usually keeps to a little private area of
his own. When no females are present, the male birds
will be dancing, whirring round like Dervishes, and spar-
ring and jousting with each other. On the arrival of a
female, the scene is changed. The males crouch down,
immobile, sometimes flat on the ground with spread wings.

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THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS

The hen may simply stroll round and fly away again —
on which the cock birds rise rather sheepishly from their
prostrate posture, as if pretending that nothing had been
going on. Or she may approach a male and nibble at his
neck, on which mating is consummated.

Edmund Selous watched one particular ruff hill in
Holland for weeks, arriving at his hide at or before dawn.
Every male on the hill was distinguishable by his appear-
ance; and so Selous was able to discover that some were
more successful than others.

Here is Darwin's theory in practice, working itself out
in every detail — the adornments developed only by the
male in the breeding season, and used only in sexual
combat and sexual display; the male with no power to
enforce his desires, the female completely arbiter of her
choice; and, finally, the evidence that choice is exercised.
The only puzzling point is the extreme variability of the
males. This may be explained by some later discoveries.
Various biologists, as we shall see later, have found that
display, combat, and threat have a direct physiological
effect on birds of both sexes, actually helping to ripen
the reproductive organs. And Fraser Darling and others
have recently shown that this effect is cumulative, some
stimulus resulting from the sight of other birds courting
or fighting. This at once explains the frequent occur-
rence of communal display-grounds: they are arrange-
ments for heightening reproductive efficiency. But it
also explains the rufF s variability. If, as seems reason-
able, the unfamiliar is more exciting than the familiar,
variety will have a greater mass-stimulating effect than
uniformity. So, granted a tendency to marked variation,
variety will be encouraged and preserved.

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

This clear-cut case is of importance, because it enables
us to draw pretty definite conclusions in other similar
cases. In the blackcock, for instance, a handsome mem-
ber of the grouse tribe, there are similar assembly-places
for mating — veritable temples of Venus. Here the indi-
vidual males cannot be distinguished, but each again ap-
pears to have his own definite pitch or stand, and, both
from direct watching and by analogy with the ruff, it seems
that here, too, there is true selection. Finally, in some birds
of paradise there are also mating-places, but in the trees,
where the males dance and display their gorgeous plumes.

It is interesting to note that the evolution of such special
mating-places with assemblies of males and visits by fe-
males has taken place at least three separate times in birds
— in the waders, the game-birds, and the birds of paradise.
The influence of mode of life on type of courtship is an-
other problem that can be followed out in birds. Where
there is polygamy and where the female alone broods the
eggs and cares for the young, there we find the greatest
disparity in colour and courtship-behaviour between the
sexes. The female is generally drab, protectively col-
oured; the male, per contra , brilliant, and alone participat-
ing in display. Since there is polygamy (or promiscuity),
the successful male will imprint his characters on a larger
number of descendants — and so display-brilliance will be
at a premium; while, since he plays no biologically use-
ful r6le after fertilization is once effected, there is less need
for protective colour, since it does not much matter
whether he be killed or no.

Most birds are monogamous, however, at least for the
season (or sometimes only for a single brood — like the
American wren, which as bird-banding experiments have

198

THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS

shown, usually changes partners between the first and
second broods of a single year). Most of the largest
group of monogamous birds, the song-birds proper, have
their whole sex-life hinge on what we may call the terri-
torial system. They have their young hatched naked and
helpless, needing abundant food for their growth, and
liable to die of cold if left too long unbrooded. Hence
it is necessary, first, for both parent birds to feed the
young; second, for the presence round the nest of an
area sufficiently large to supply the young’s needs, and
not trespassed upon by other food-seeking parents of
the same species. This is ensured through an exten-
sion of the instinct, nearly universal among birds, to resent
intrusion into the area round the actual or future nest-site.

Even in colonial nesters, like egrets or guillemots, the
defended area exists, though it may be only a couple of
feet across. In what we may call the true territorial birds,
or birds with feeding as well as nesting territory, the
course of events is as follows (I follow in this particular
Eliot Howard’s admirable description of the course of
events in the European warblers or Sylviidae ). The males
are first on the breeding-grounds. If the species be a
spring migrant, the males generally migrate north a week
or so ahead of the females. Arrived, they take possession
of an area — a territory — sometimes without dispute, some-
times after a fight with a simultaneous arrival or a bird
already in possession. Then they begin their singing.
Contrary to usual belief, the song of most song-birds is at
its best before the mate has even arrived. As Howard
has, I think, convincingly shown, the prime function of
song is an advertisement. It is an advertisement of
eligibly-occupied territory, which serves the double pur-

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

pose of attracting females and warning off other males.
Similarly, many of the special display-characters of males
are used in threat-display against other males as well as
in courtship-display to females.

When the females arrive on the scene, no immediate
courtship on the part of the males is to be observed. If
the female is alone, she simply takes her place in the terri-
tory, and the two are a pair for the season. Nature abhors
a vacuum, and this particular vacuum, the absence of the
female from a territory, is filled with the least possible fuss.
If two rival females arrive together, it is they who fight
for the possession of territory-plus-male, while he hovers
about, an interested and even excited spectator, but without
participating. Then follows the strange fact, which at
first sight seems to upset the whole Darwinian apple-cart,
namely that courtship and display now begin vigorously
—only now, after the two birds are mated for the season.
The male vibrates his wings, spreads his tail, puffs his
feathers, bows and scrapes, runs before his mate, often
with a leaf or twig or other piece of nest material in his
beak, and his antics may be so extravagant as to testify to
the most ardent excitement within. How can this be
fitted in with Darwin’s view that these antics and displays
have been evolved in large measure through the female’s
selection ? To this, what we have learned from the lowly
newt provides the answer. Courtship and display need
not always have as their chief result the choosing of a
mate. They may be, and indeed normally appear to be,
accessory to the act of pairing and fertilization itself. The
mind of a bird is a complex thing, and so is its life; the
bird cannot always be tuned to a sexual situation. The
simplest way, it would appear, of ensuring that it is not

THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS

always so tuned (with consequent excessive pairing), and
yet of ensuring that both sexes shall be simultaneously
ready to mate often enough, is that one sex — the male —
shall be more constantly in the phase of sexual prepared-
ness, and by his display shall both advertise the fact and also
help to stimulate the female to the proper emotional level.

Finally, as we have mentioned, there is a more direct
biological advantage in display. It appears that in seasons
which have been inclement just before and during egg-
laying, the number of eggs is often reduced and the per-
centage of infertility raised. It is also known that all the
reproductive processes of birds are very much under the
control of the higher, emotional centres of the brain. For
instance, a female dove brought up in isolation from in-
fancy will usually lay no eggs; but the presence of a male
bird in a near-by cage, or even the caressing of her neck
with a human finger in a way reminiscent of the caresses
of the male’s nibbling beak, will almost always cause an
egg to be laid. It has now been demonstrated that dis-
play and threat promote the ripening of the reproductive
organs; this will be of advantage, especially in bad
seasons, since birds’ emotions are very much at the mercy
of the weather.

Before leaving this group, mention should be made of
the curious fact that in all-the-year residents who are also
territory-birds, there is an ‘engagement’ period in the
spring. For some weeks after the pair are in possession of
a territory, fertilization is not effected. The biological
reason for this is plain — it is advantageous for a bird to be
on its territory early, or it may not find one; but it must
not breed before a date which will give the probability of
there being plenty of food for the young. The physio-

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

logical machinery by which it is effected resides in the
female; it is only at a certain season (probably depending
on a certain mean temperature) that the eggs in her ovary
start to grow rapidly, and only then that her full sex-
instincts arise.

Finally, we come to the large group of birds in which
both male and female not only help look after the young,
but also share in incubation and in the building of the nest.
Such are the herons, the pelicans, the grebes, the divers,
and many others. In them, neither parent is biologically
the more precious ; so that if protective colour is needed,
it is needed by both. Furthermore, their instincts have to
be so similar in regard to nest, eggs, and young that the
similarity, it appears, has spread to their courtship habits,
too. For it is at any rate a fact that in a large number of
this group of birds, and nowhere else, we find what we
must call mutual courtship — both sexes developing bright
colours and special structures for the breeding season, and
both using them simultaneously in a mutual display
(which, as with other monogamists among birds, begins
only after pairing-up).

Anyone who, like myself, has watched such birds by the
hour day after day, must be struck by the fact of their en-
joyment of the courtship ceremonies for their own sake,
and the further fact that the ceremonies are often what we
may call biologically self-exhausting, in that the birds’
emotional tension is often liberated through them, instead
of being stimulated and leading on to actual pairing. It
would seem as if these strange and romantic displays —
head-shaking, or diving for weed, or aquatic dances breast
to breast, or relieving guard on the nest with ceremonies
of parade, or presentation of a twig with wings and crest

202

THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS

a-quiver, — as if they constituted a bond between the two
birds of the pair, binding them together so long as the
breeding season lasted by emotional links. And after all,
why not? Does not something similar obtain in human
society? And does it not there play a valuable role, in
cementing with love and joy the racially important edifice
of the family ? And if it has this value in man, why not in
these birds, for whom too the co-operation of both parents
for the good of the family is essential ?

Here then we see display pressed, not merely into the
service of one male against the rest, not merely facilitating
fertilization, but into that of the super-individual unit, the
family. And it is interesting that the family life of birds
attains its highest development in these forms which have,
we may say, equal sex rights and duties.

In yet other cases we see display becoming social, and
courtship tending (as again sometimes in man) to be again
diverted from its original character of individual wooing,
this time toward the publicity of the dance. Among birds
I myself have investigated, this is best seen in the oyster-
catcher, the bold black-and-white shore bird, with red bill,
sometimes known as sea-pie. Gatherings of eight or ten
birds of this species may be seen in spring, all careering
around together in their stiff courtship attitude with neck
out-thrust and long bill pointing vertically downwards, and
a piercing noise of trilled piping issuing from their throats.
Observation revealed that this is not only the commonest
form of display, but the only one used while on the ground ;
that it may be employed by the male alone, or mutually by
male and female together; and that, in addition to its
courtship function, it expresses jealous hostility of other
trespassing birds, whether trespassing on territorial or

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

sexual rights. When, in a flock in early spring, courtship
begins, other birds may join in the excitement; hostility
re-enforces love, and soon the whole number are careering
round in frenzied excitement which is, it seems, neither
sexual nor hostile, but social. Here the social dance
appears to have little or no special function, but is rather
a biological accident.

Psychologically, one of the most interesting things
about bird courtship is the frequency with which in dis-
play the birds will carry in their beaks a piece of the
material of which their nest is built. This holds good
even for the Ad£lie penguins, charmingly described by
Dr Levick. Here the nest is nothing but a rim of stones
round a depression; and accordingly the male presents
stones to his mate as part of his courtship. Interestingly
enough, this action sometimes becomes diverted to serve
other instincts and emotions, such as wonder — the birds
will present stones to dogs and to men; and Dr Levick
confesses to having felt quite embarrassed the first time he
was the recipient 1 Still another tale hangs by these stones.
The sitting birds are all the time stealing stones from each
other’s nests. Levick painted a number of stones different
colours, and placed them at one margin of the nesting
area. After this he could mark the rate of their progress
(all by theft!) across the colony; and found that the red
stones travelled much quicker than the rest. This is of
great theoretical interest, for red is a colour which is to all
intents and purposes absent in the penguin’s environment
— and yet they prefer it above all others. If a male pen-
guin could grow a red patch he would probably be very
quick to gain a mate.

Such an example also shows in what sort of way the
204

THE COURTSHIP OF ANIMALS

extraordinary bowers of the bower-bird can have devel-
oped. These are a blend between art gallery and museum,
usually a tunnel of twigs with a collection of shells, bones,
berries, and flowers at one end. In one species a space of
ground is cleared, and large leaves laid upon it, their sil -
very under-surface upwards. As they wither, they are
replaced ; if they are blown over, the silver side is turned
up once more.

Among the mammals, there is on the whole little court-
ship or display by the males, but correspondingly more
fighting. This probably depends on the fact that the re-
productive instincts of the female mammal are more
rigidly under a definite physiological control, less under
the fluid control of higher, emotional centres; the male
deer or elephant-seal has but to guard his harem, and they
will automatically accept him in due time. There is, how-
ever, a great deal still to be discovered of the courtships of
monogamous mammals — a difficult subject, because so
many are nocturnal or burrowers, but one that would
well repay study. Among some intelligent quadrupeds,
however, such as the elephant, a pleasant mutual court-
ship, of trunk-caresses, has been described ; and when we
move up toward Homo sapiens and reach the monkeys
and apes, we find a number of display and threat characters
among the males. Some are to us repulsive, like the
naked scarlet and azure cheeks of the Mandril, or the blue
of Stevenson’s

. . . blue-behinded ape that skips

about the trees of Paradise.

But others, like the orang or some of the marmosets with
their mustachios, or the Satan monkey with his fine beard,

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are curiously reminiscent of ourselves, and we are re-
minded of Mr Hilaire Belloc’s baboon —

The Big Baboon who lives upon
The plains of Caribou,

He goes about with nothing on
— A shocking thing to do.

But if he dressed respectably
And let his whiskers grow,

How like that Big Baboon would be
To Mister — So-and-So!

Courtship in animals is the outcome of four major
steps in evolution. First, the development of sexuality;
secondly, the separation of the sexes; thirdly, internal
fertilization, or at least the approximation of males and
females; and finally, the development of efficient sense-
organs and brains. Without any one of these, there would
never have existed that host of strange and lovely features
of life, summed up under the head of courtship, which
beautify the appearance and variegate the existence of so
many of the higher animals, including our own species.

206

THE INTELLIGENCE OF BIRDS

A century and a half ago, it was generally accepted,
even by professional naturalists, that nature repre-
sented a single scale, culminating in man. There existed,
they supposed, a ladder of life, each rung of which was re-
presented by a different type of animal, with humanity as
the highest of all. And from this point of view, each kind
of living creature represented merely a step on the way to
man, its nature an incomplete realization of human nature.

But with further study, especially after it was illumin-
ated by the theory of evolution, a wholly different and
more interesting picture emerged. The various types of
animals — insects, fish, crustaceans, birds and the rest —
could not be thought of as the rungs of one ladder, the
steps of a single staircase; they now appeared as the
branches of a tree, the ever-growing tree of evolving life.
And with this, they took on a new interest. It might still
be that man was at the summit of the whole; but he was
at the top of the tree only by being at the top of one par-
ticular branch. There existed many other branches, quite
different in their nature, in which life was working out its
ends in a different way from that she had adopted in the
human branch. By looking at these branches we are able
to see not merely our own natures in an incomplete state,
but quite other expressions of life, quite other kinds of
nature from our own. Life appears not as a single finished
article, but as a whole series of diverse and fascinating

207

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

experiments to deal with the problems of the world. We
happen to be the most successful experiment, but we are
not therefore the most beautiful or the most ingenious.

Of these various experiments, the two which are the
most interesting are on the one hand the insects, with
their bodies confined within the armour of their skeletons,
their minds cramped within the strange rigidity of in-
stinct, and on the other hand the birds.

It is with these latter that I am concerned here; and I
shall try to picture some of the differences between their
minds and our own. But first we need a little evolutionary
background so as to grasp some of the main characters of
this particular branch of life. Birds, then, branched off
from reptiles somewhere about a hundred million years
ago, a good long time after our own mammalian ancestry
had taken its origin from another branch of the great rep-
tilian stock. The birds* whole nature was of course re-
modelled in connection with flight, so that their fore-limb
was irrevocably converted into a wing, and no chance was
left of remoulding it into a hand. They clung obstinately
to one important character of their reptilian ancestry — the
shelled egg, whereas their mammalian rivals came to spe-
cialize in the internal nourishment of the young, inside the
mother’s body; and by this the birds debarred themselves
from ever being born into the world at such an advanced
state of development as is possible to man and other higher
mammals. But in one thing at least they went further
than any mammal; they not only developed a constant
temperature, but kept it constant at a greater height.
Birds and mammals are unique among living things in
having evolved the self-regulating central-heating system
that we call 4 warm blood,’ a system which is of the utmost

THE INTELLIGENCE OF BIRDS

importance, since it enables their activities of body and
nind to continue on a more or less constant level instead
>f being slowed down by cold, speeded up by heat, as is
lie case with all other kinds of animals, and makes it pos-
sible for them to laugh at extremes of temperature which
send insects or reptiles into the sleep of hibernation or
lestivation. But birds have pushed the invention to its
imits : they live at temperatures which would be the ex-
:remes of fever for us.

It is this extremely high temperature, 105 degrees or
>ver, combined with the agility that comes of flight, which
jives birds their fascinating quality of seeming always so
ntensely alive. But being intensely alive does not neces-
sarily, as we know from human examples, mean being
ntensely intelligent. And in fact, in respect of their
minds just as much as their bodies, birds have developed
ilong other lines than mammals. Mammals have gradu-
illy perfected intelligence and the capacity for learning by
experience, until this line has culminated in that conscious
reason and in that deliberate reliance upon the accumu-
lated experience of previous generations, which are unique
properties of the human species. And with the gradual
rise of intelligence, the power and fixity of the instincts
has diminished. Birds, on the other hand, have kept
instinct as the mainstay of their behaviour; they possess,
like all other backboned animals, some intelligence and
some power of profiting by experience, but these are sub-
ordinate, used merely to polish up the outfit of instincts
which is provided by heredity without having to be paid
for in terms of experience. Indeed, the anatomist could
tell you as much by looking at the brains of bird and
mammal, even if he had never studied the way the crea-
h 209

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

tures behave. For whereas in mammals we can trace a
steady increase in the size and elaboration of the cerebral
hemispheres, the front part of the brain which we know to
be the seat of intelligence and learning, this region is never
highly developed in any bird, but remains relatively small,
without convolutions on its surface; while other parts
which are known to be the regulating machinery for com-
plicated but more automatic and more emotional actions,
are in birds relatively larger than in four-footed creatures.

But enough of this generalizing. What I wanted to
show at the outset was the fact that in the lives of birds we
are not merely studying the actions of creatures which,
though small and feathered, had minds of the same type
as ourselves, albeit on a lower level, but of a branch of the
tree of life which, in mind as in body, has specialized along
a line of its own, showing us mind of a different quality
from ours. They have raised emotion to the highest pitch
found in animals; the line of mammals has done the same
thing for intelligence.

Perhaps the most obvious way in which birds differ
from men in their behaviour is that they can do all that
they have to do, including some quite complicated things,
without ever being taught. Flying, to start with, is an
activity which, for all its astonishing complexity of balance
and aeronautical adjustment, comes untaught to birds.
Young birds very frequently make their first flight when
their parents are out of sight. Practice, of course, makes
perfect and puts a polish on the somewhat awkward first
performance; but there is no elaborate learning needed as
with our learning of golf or tennis or figure-skating.
Furthermore, the stories of old birds Teaching’ their
young to fly seem all to be erroneous. Some kinds of

210

THE INTELLIGENCE OF BIRDS

birds, once their young are full-fledged, do try to lure them
away from the nest. But this merely encourages them to
take the plunge; there is no instruction by the old bird
in the movements of flight, no conscious imitation by the
young.

But flight, after all, is something very organic. What
is much more extraordinary than that a bird should be
able to fly untaught (though this demands a formidable
complexity of self-regulating machinery provided ready-
made by Nature in the form of muscles and skeleton,
nerves and nerve centres, eyes and balance organs) is that
it should be able to build its nest untaught. And of this
there can be no manner of doubt. Young birds, mating
for the first time, can make perfectly good nests, and nests
of the usual type found among their particular species.
Some people have suggested that this may be due to their
having absorbed the necessary knowledge from contem-
plating the structure of the nest in which they were brought
up. But even if we were to admit that this was possible —
which is very unlikely, considering that the young of small
birds are very stupid, only live a few days in the nest after
their eyes are open, and are never given any lessons in
nest-building by their parents — it is negatived by the facts.
For instance, the celebrated mound-builders or brush-
turkeys of the Australian region build large mounds of
rubbish and decaying leaves and deposit their eggs at the
end of tunnels in the mounds, leaving them to be hatched
out by the heat of the fermenting vegetation. The young
brush-turkey on hatching scrambles out of the tunnel; it
can get no instruction from its parents, since they have
long since gone about their own business ; and not only
does it not stay around the mound long enough to observe

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Perhaps the most obvious way in which birds differ
from men in their behaviour is that they can do all that
they have to do, including some quite complicated things,
without ever being taught. Flying, to start with, is an
activity which, for all its astonishing complexity of balance
and aeronautical adjustment, comes untaught to birds.
Young birds very frequently make their first flight when
their parents are out of sight. Practice, of course, makes
perfect and puts a polish on the somewhat awkward first
performance; but there is no elaborate learning needed as
with our learning of golf or tennis or figure-skating.
Furthermore, the stories of old birds * teaching’ their
young to fly seem all to be erroneous. Some kinds of

210

THE INTELLIGENCE OF BIRDS

birds, once their young are full-fledged, do try to lure them
away from the nest. But this merely encourages them to
take the plunge ; there is no instruction by the old bird
in the movements of flight, no conscious imitation by the
young.

But flight, after all, is something very organic. What
is much more extraordinary than that a bird should be
able to fly untaught (though this demands a formidable
complexity of self-regulating machinery provided ready-
made by Nature in the form of muscles and skeleton,
nerves and nerve centres, eyes and balance organs) is that
it should be able to build its nest untaught. And of this
there can be no manner of doubt. Young birds, mating
for the first time, can make perfectly good nests, and nests
of the usual type found among their particular species.
Some people have suggested that this may be due to their
having absorbed the necessary knowledge from contem-
plating the structure of the nest in which they were brought
up. But even if we were to admit that this was possible —
which is very unlikely, considering that the young of small
birds are very stupid, only live a few days in the nest after
their eyes are open, and are never given any lessons in
nest-building by their parents — it is negatived by the facts.
For instance, the celebrated mound-builders or brush-
turkeys of the Australian region build large mounds of
rubbish and decaying leaves and deposit their eggs at the
end of tunnels in the mounds, leaving them to be hatched
out by the heat of the fermenting vegetation. The young
brush-turkey on hatching scrambles out of the tunnel ; it
can get no instruction from its parents, since they have
long since gone about their own business; and not only
does it not stay around the mound long enough to observe

21 1

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

how it is constructed, but does not bestow on it so much
as a look. None the less, when the time comes for it to
mate, it will build a mound just as its ancestors have done.

Secondly, even young birds which have been brought
up by hand in artificial nests — boxes lined by cotton wool
or what not — will build the proper kind of nest for their
species when the time comes for mating, and will not
attempt to reproduce their own early homes. We are
reminded of Dr Johnson’s comment on the suggestion
that the attraction which woman’s bosom has for the male
sex is due to its pleasurable association with food during
infancy. He did not notice, he said, that those who had
been hand-fed when babies evinced any passionate foncU
ness for bottles. In fact, the impulse of sex attraction in
the one case, the impulse to construct a nest of a certain
type in the other, cannot be explained by any rationalistic
arguments of this sort; the one and the other are based
not upon reason, not upon association, but upon instinct.
The finch, for instance, has the impulse, when its mating
urge is upon it, to weave coarse material into a rough cup,
and then to line this with some finer material; the tailor-
bird has the impulse to take leaves and sew them together;
the house-martin to collect mud or clay and construct a
cup against the side of a cliff or a house.

In a not dissimilar way, the bird which is in the physio-
logical state of broodiness will have the violent urge to sit
on eggs, or, if no eggs are available, it will often take some-
thing else. Crows have been known to brood golf-balls,
gulls to sit on tobacco-tins substituted for their eggs; and
the majestic emperor penguin, if it loses its egg or chick,
will even brood lumps of ice in its inhospitable Antarctic
home.

212

THE INTELLIGENCE OF BIRDS

This fobbing off of a natural urge with an unnatural
substitute is doubtless unintelligent; but we may ask
whether it is more unintelligent than the behaviour of
elderly maiden ladies who spend their maternal impulses
upon lapdogs or canaries, or that of disappointed old
bachelors who turn their energies into a useless hobby.

In all probability, however, the bird's behaviour is more
unintelligent; for undoubtedly it does not even ration-
alize as we do, or seek to find reasons for its behaviour.
How un-humanly a bird regards the central facts of its
life is seen in many of its relations to its offspring. Birds
undoubtedly have a strong emotional concern over their
eggs and young, but it is an instinctive, irrational concern,
not an instinct entwined, as is the human parents' concern,
with reason, memory, personal affection, and foresight.
A pair of birds is robbed of their whole brood ; the parental
instinct finds itself frustrated, and they will show great
agitation. But if one or more of the nestlings die before
they are fledged — a frequent and in some species a normal
occurrence — the old birds show no signs of sorrow or
even agitation, but merely throw the corpse out of the
nest as if it were a stick or a piece of dirt. And while a
chick is, to our eyes, obviously failing, the old birds, far
from making special efforts to restore it, as would human
parents, definitely neglect it. The fact seems to be that
the bird parent feels parental only when stimulated by
some activity on the part of its children. When they gape
and squawk, this is a stimulus to the parent to feed and
tend them assiduously; when the stimulus fails, the par-
ental feeling is no longer aroused, the bird is no longer
impelled to parental actions.

This same incapacity to experience things as men and
*13

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

women would experience them is shown by the fact that
if you remove young birds from a nest, as Mr Kearton did
with some starlings, and substitute some eggs, the mother,
after a moment’s apparent surprise, may accept the situa-
tion with equanimity, and respond to the new stimulus in
the proper way, by sitting on the eggs. There was no
trace of the distraction and grief which a human mother
would have felt.

But perhaps the familiar cuckoo provides us with the
completest proof, over the widest field, of the dissimilarity
of birds’ minds with our own. The young cuckoo, having
been deposited as an egg in the nest of some quite other
species of bird — a meadow-pipit, say, or a hedge-sparrow
— and having hatched out in double-quick time, the rate of
its embryonic development being adjusted to its parasitic
habits, so that it shall not lag behind its foster-brothers,
next proceeds to evict all the rest of the contents of the
nest, be these eggs or young birds. It is provided with a
flat and indeed slightly hollow back; and, hoisting its
victim on to this, it crawls backwards up the side of the
nest, to pitch the object outside. Thus it continues to do
until the nest is empty.

What cruelty, you will say, and what unpleasant in-
genuity! But you will be wrong. The nestling cuckoo
is not cruel, nor does he know why he is murdering his
fellow nest-mates. He acts blindly, because he is a ma-
chine constructed to act thus and not otherwise. Not only
is his back slightly concave, but this concavity is highly
irritable and over-sensitive ; the touch of any object there
drives him frantic, and if it is continued, it releases the
impulse to walk upwards and backwards until he has
reached the edge of whatever he is walking on, and then

214

THE INTELLIGENCE OF BIRDS

to tilt the object overboard. He will behave in just the
same way to marbles or hazel-nuts or any other small
object. Indeed, if you think of it, he cannot know what
he is doing. For he will act thus immediately he is
hatched, before his eyes are open ; even if he could be
taught, his parents have never been near him, and his
foster-parents are hardly likely to instruct him in this par-
ticular! No, the whole train of actions is the outcome of a
marvellous piece of machinery with which he is endowed
by heredity, just as he is endowed with the equally marvel-
lous adaptive mechanism of his feathers. The machinery
consists in the shape of the back, its hyper-sensitiveness,
and the intricate pattern of nervous connections in the
brain and spinal cord which set the particular muscles
into action. The act in fact is purely instinctive, just as
instinctive and automatic as sneezing or coughing in our-
selves. And, like coughing, it has been brought into being
by the long unconscious processes of natural selection,
not by any foresight or conscious will.

Once the foster-brothers are outside, we shall get another
surprising peep into bird mind. When the foster-mother
comes home, she does not seem in the least distressed by
the absence of all but one of her brood, but at once sets
about feeding the changeling. What is more, she pays no
attention to her own offspring, even should some of these
be dangling just outside the nest. As long as there is
something in the nest which appeals to her parental in-
stincts, it seems that young birds outside the nest, even
if they be her own, are treated as so many foreign
objects.

Then the young cuckoo begins to grow. It grows into
a creature entirely different from its foster-parents, and

215

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

eventually becomes several times bulkier than they, so
that they have to perch on its head to drop food into its
mouth! But they are not in the least disconcerted, as
would human parents if their children began growing into
giants, and giants of quite a different appearance from
themselves. They are built to respond to the stimulus of
appeals for food from any nestling that starts life in their
nest, and they continue their response, whether the nest-
ling is their own or a cuckoo.

At last the young cuckoo is ready to fly, leaves his foster-
parents, and very soon must leave the country on migra-
tion. So far as we know, all the old cuckoos have before
this time left the country for the south, so that it is again
without any teaching or any knowledge that the young
ones must obey the migration urge.

Some very interesting experiments by Professor Rowan
of Alberta have thrown a good deal of light on this mys-
terious question of the impulse to migrate. In autumn,
he caught a number of birds which usually leave the
regions of an Alberta winter for the south (crows and the
little finches called juncos were the kind he used), and
kept them in unheated aviaries. So long as they were sup-
plied with plenty of food, they remained perfectly healthy
and happy, even with the temperature many degrees below
zero. One lot were simply kept thus, as ‘controls 1 for the
experiment: but another lot, in place of being exposed to
the natural shortening of the days in early winter, had their
days artificially lengthened by electric light, a little more
every evening. In midwinter, Rowan liberated a number
of birds. The controls made no attempt to migrate south-
wards, but just hung about the place. The birds whose
day had been lengthened, however, for the most part did

216

THE INTELLIGENCE OF BIRDS

move away — but apparently most of them moved north
and not south 1

Other birds were killed and examined: all the controls,
as was expected, had their reproductive organs shrunken
to the tiny size characteristic of birds in winter ; but the
long-day birds showed reproductive organs which were
enlarging like those of ordinary wild birds in early spring
about the time of northward migration.

The view held by Rowan — and though it cannot yet
be regarded as completely proved, it certainly seems prob-
able — is as follows. The extra length of day caused the
birds to spend more of their time in activity, less in sleep ;
this, by some mechanism we do not yet understand,
caused the reproductive organs to begin to grow instead
of shrinking ; and the secretions of the reproductive organs
control the migratory urge. When they are shrinking in
early autumn, the changed secretion in the blood impels
the birds to move south. When they are tiny and in-
active, as normally in the dead of winter, there is no im-
pulse to migrate at all ; and when they are growing again,
the secretion impels to northward movement, even if the
bird be already in the most wintry and inhospitable con-
ditions.

Whatever the precise interpretation, it is at least clear
that the impulse to migrate is a strange blind urge, con-
trolled and set in motion by the chemical agency of the
reproductive secretions, and wholly unrelated to reason,
or to any consciously-envisaged destination.

Then again there is the well-known 4 broken-wing trick*
practised by so many birds when their young are threat-
ened. Most writers of natural-history books set this down
as a remarkable example of intelligence: — the bird, seeing

217

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

its offspring in danger, deliberately invents a ruse, and
acts its part with consummate skill to draw the intruder
away. All the evidence, however, points to this too being
merely instinctive, a trick not invented by the individual
bird, but patented by the species. If it were the fruit of
intelligent reflection, we should expect to find some indi-
viduals of a species practising it, others not, and great
variations in the efficacy of the performance; but in species
like the purple sandpiper or the arctic skua, every indi-
vidual seems to be a good performer, and this without any
previous training. The trick, in fact, is on a par with the
purely automatic ‘shamming dead’ which many insects
practise: it is the inevitable outcome of the animal’s nerv-
ous machinery when this machinery is stimulated in a
particular way.

Besides instinctive actions, we could multiply instances
of unintelligent behaviour among birds. If a strange egg
is put among a bird’s own eggs, the mother may accept it
through uncritical instinct, or may intelligently turn it out
of the nest and continue to sit. But a quite common re-
action is for it to turn the strange egg out, and then to
desert its nest — a most decidedly illogical procedure!
Again, Mr St Quentin had two hens and one cock of a
kind of sand-grouse in his aviary. This is a bird in which
the hens normally sit by day, the cock by night. One
year, both the hens laid at the same time. The cock tried
his best, sitting part of the night on one clutch, part on
another, but of course the eggs came to nothing. If the
birds had had any intelligence, they would have divided
up the twenty-four hours so that the eggs were always
brooded; but the day-brooding of the hens and the night-
brooding of the cock are mechanical instincts, and intelli-

2*18

THE INTELLIGENCE OF BIRDS

gence neither enters into them in normal nor modifies
them in abnormal circumstances.

But because birds are mainly instinctive and not intelli-
gent in their actions, it does not follow that their minds
are lacking in intensity or variety: so far as we can judge,
they must be experiencing a wide range of powerful emo-
tions.

A bird clearly finds an intense satisfaction in fulfilling
its brooding impulse or the impulse to feed its young,
even though the impulse may be, for want of intelligence,
what we should call a strangely blind one: and when the
young birds are threatened with danger, the parents clearly
are suffering very real distress, just as birds suffer very
real fear when cornered by an enemy. In song, too, the
bird, besides expressing a certain general well-being, is
giving vent to a deep current of feeling, even if it does not
understand the feeling or reflect upon it, as would a human
poet or musician. For the moment, they are that feeling.
Some birds are so obsessed by their emotions during their
courtship display that they become oblivious of danger.
The males of that huge bird of the grouse tribe, the caper-
caillie, have an extraordinary courtship ceremony which
they carry out at daybreak in the branches of a favourite
tree. While they are in the ecstasy of this passionate per-
formance a man can easily creep up within range; and it
is by this method that in certain countries many are shot.

Again, birds seem as subject as men to the emotion of
jealousy. Rival cocks may fight to the death. One re-
markable case with captive parrakeets is quite human in
its incidents. Two cocks and a hen were in one cage.
After much squabbling, one night one of the cocks killed
the other: upon which the hen, who had hitherto rather

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

favoured this bird, turned upon him and might have killed
him too if they had not been separated.

Then bird-mind has sufficient subtlety to indulge in
play. Dr Gill of Cape Town records seeing a hooded
crow fly up into the air, drop a small object it was carrying,
swoop after it, croaking loudly, catch it in mid air, and
repeat the performance over and over again with the great-
est evidence of enjoyment. And tame ravens often display
what seems a real sense of humour, though it must be ad-
mitted humour of rather a low order. A pair of them will
combine to tease a cat or dog, one occupying its attention
from the front, while the other steals round behind to
tweak its tail and hop off with loud and delighted squawk-
ings. They will play tricks on each other; in an aviary,
one raven of a pair has been seen to slink up from behind
when its mate was sitting on a low perch, and then reach
up to knock the perching bird’s foot from under it, with
evident malicious enjoyment.

But in all these varied manifestations of emotion, birds
still differ in a fundamental way from ourselves. Being
without the power of conceptual thought, their emotion,
while occupying their life with a completeness which is
perhaps rarer with us, is not linked up with the future or
the past as in a human mind. Their fear is just fear: it is
not the fear of death, nor can it anticipate pain, nor become
an ingredient of a lasting ‘complex.’ They cannot worry
or torment themselves. When the fear-situation is past,
the fear just disappears. So, as we have seen, with their
maternal instincts. The bird mother is not concerned
with the fate of an individual offspring, as a human mother
would be concerned about Johnny’s career or Tommy’s
poor health. She is concerned just to give vent to her

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THE INTELLIGENCE OF BIRDS

instincts impersonally, as it were; and when the young
grow up and her inner physiology changes, there is no
intellectual framework making a continuing personal or
individual interest possible.

That indeed is the greatest difference between the bird
and ourselves. We, whether we want to or not, cannot
help living within the framework of a continuing life.
Our powers of thought and imagination bind up the pre-
sent with the future and the past: the bird’s life is almost
wholly a patchwork, a series of self-sufficing moments.

aai

SCIENCE, NATURAL AND SOCIAL

I. Methods in Social Science

S cience, in the more restricted sense in which it is nor-
mally employed in English-speaking countries, is that
activity by which to-day we attain the great bulk of our
knowledge of and control over the facts of nature. This
activity, like other human activities, has developed and
evolved, and by no means all the stages in its evolution
have merited the title of scientific. In remote prehistoric
times, our early ancestors worked by trial and error com-
bined with simple, intuitive common-sense. This pre-
scientific approach, however, was combined with the non-
scientific methods of control that we call magic, and equally
non-scientific rationalizations in the field of explanation.

Once agriculture had given 1 the possibility of settled
civilizations, with written record and specialized social
classes, the hand-to-mouth methods of common-sense
could be replaced by something much more scientific.
Science was born — witness the astronomy and geometry
of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. But science in
this phase was still, to our modern view, unscientific in
two major aspects — it was traditional and it was esoteric.
Scientific knowledge was confined to a limited group among
the priesthood and it was cast in a mould of tradition
which rendered change and progress slow. Being associ-
ated with the priesthood, it was also intimately bound up
with non-scientific practice and non-scientific interpreta-
tion — magic and theology.

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SCIENCE, NATURAL AND SOCIAL

The era of groping trial and error lasted from the first
dawn of essentially human intelligence, as marked by true
speech, to the beginnings of settled civilization — perhaps
a million, perhaps half a million years. The next, or
traditional-esoteric phase, lasted for thousands instead ot
hundreds of thousands of years. After some three or four
millennia, the Greeks suddenly burst free of the prison of
secrecy and traditionalism and proclaimed the freedom of
intellectual inquiry. The ‘birth of science* is usually
fathered on them, but the assumption is only a half-truth.
At best, their achievement was the acquisition of freedom
and self-consciousness by the scientific spirit, not the
emergence of a wholly new activity called science. And
secondly, the type of science which it inaugurated differed
radically from modern science in several respects. It was
almost entirely divorced from industry and practical appli-
cation; it was exceedingly speculative and did not lay the
same stress on experimental verification as we do; and,
correlated with this, it had not invented the modern
methodology of publication of the data and methods used,
as well as the conclusions reached.

A few centuries later, the combination of Greek intel-
lect and ingenuity with the practical spirit of the Roman
imperium made Alexandrian science something much
more like modern science in outlook and methods of work-
ing. But this was swallowed up in the anti-scientific
Christian flood and the general collapse of Roman civil-
ization.

During the Dark Ages in the West, the Arabs kept the
scientific spirit alive, and by means of their mathematical
inventions paved the way for, immense improvements in
the technique of scientific research.

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Natural science, in its modern form, can fairly be said
to date back no further than the seventeenth century.
With Bacon as its St John the Baptist, it developed its
gospel and its ministry. Curipsity for its own sake, but
also interest in industrial techniques and practical control ;
freedom of inquiry; experimental verification in place of
authority; full publication and abundant discussion —
with these a truly new phase was inaugurated.

To-day it seems that we are again in the process of
launching a new phase of science — one in which social as
well as natural phenomena are to be made amenable to
scientific understanding and rational control.

As with natural science, social science too has had its
earlier stages. It too passed through the stage of trial and
error, in which social organization shaped itself under the
influence of unconscious adjustment together with non-
rational rules of conduct and non-scientific interpretations
of human destiny. It also had its traditional phases, often
tightly bound up with philosophical and theological inter-
pretative principles, as, for example, in the climax of the
Middle Ages. And it has had its birth of free speculative
inquiry, parallel to the Greek phase of natural science —
but two thousand years later, in the philosophers of the
seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century.

Finally, its modern stage now dawning has had, like the
modern stage of natural science, its scattered precursors,
its Roger Bacons and Leonardos — and it has had its pre-
cursor in the restricted sense, its equivalent of Francis
Bacon in the Renaissance. Many, I am sure, would put
Herbert Spencer in this position; but I believe that the
true John the Baptist of social science is Karl Marx. Her-
bert Spencer, for all his academic knowledge, or perhaps

224

SCIENCE, NATURAL AND SOCIAL

because of it, was more in the position of an Old Testa-
ment prophet. His work was essentially analogical. He
demonstrated that social science was an inevitable develop-
ment; but his notions of what form it would actually take
and what methods it should employ were vague and
essentially erroneous.

Marx, on the other hand, developed a system directly
based on social facts and directly applicable to them.
He did not just prophesy a Messiah ; he indicated the
Messiah. As natural scientists tend to undervalue Bacon
because he himself did not make discoveries or work out
experimental techniques, so social scientists tend to under-
rate Marx because his system is a dialectical one, ready-
made and complete with answer to any problem, not
sufficiently empirical and inductive for their scientific
taste. But at least Marx, like Bacon, gave expression to
a new outlook and a new method of attack, and helped
materially to alter the intellectual climate so as to make it
propitious for scientific work in his field.

The question immediately poses itself as to why the
emergence of social science into large-scale and efficient
operation has been so long delayed. The triumphs of
natural science, both in discovering radically new know-
ledge and in applying it practically to satisfy human needs,
have been so spectacular and so fruitful that it would seem
natural and obvious to extend the same methods to the
field of social phenomena.

The answer is a very simple one: the methods are not
the same. The scientific spirit remains unaltered whether
it is contemplating a nebula or a baby, a field of wheat or a
trades union. But the methodology of social science is
inevitably different from that of natural science. It is

225

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

different and must be different for one basic reason — the
investigator is inside instead of outside his material. Man
cannot investigate man by the same methods by which he
investigates external rature. He can use the methods of
natural science to investigate certain aspects of man — the
structure and working of his body, for instance, or the
mode of his heredity; but that is because these are shared
with other organisms and because they are partial aspects
which can be readily externalized. But when he starts
investigating human motive, his own motives are involved;
when he studies human society, he is himself part of a
social structure.

What consequences does this basic difference imply?
In the first place, man must here be his own guinea-pig.
But this is impossible in the strict sense, for he is unable to
make fully controlled experiments. Even if an absolute
despot were to subject a group of people to rigorous ex-
perimentation — by depriving them of alcohol, for instance,
or by adopting a new form of education — the results would
have only a limited application. The smallness of the
group, the compulsion involved, the inevitable limitations
on the contacts and full social activity of the group, would
make it impossible to apply the results directly to an entire
normal society, however regimented. And the difficulties
are of course enormously greater in any free society.

A second, more technical difficulty is in a sense a con-
sequence of the first. Causation in social science is never
simple and single as in physics or biology, but always
multiple and complex. It is of course true that one-to-one
causation is an artificial affair, only to be unearthed by
isolating phenomena from their total background. None
the less, this method is the most powerful weapon in the

226

SCIENCE, NATURAL AND SOCIAL

armoury of natural science: it disentangles the chaotic
field of influence and reduces it to a series of single causes,
each of which can then be given due weight when the
isolates are put back into their natural interrelatedness, or
when they are deliberately combined into new complexes
unknown in nature.

‘This method of analysis is impossible in social science.
Multiple causation here is irreducible. The difficulty is a
twofold one. In the first place, the human mind is always
looking for single causes for phenomena. The very idea
of multiple causation is not only difficult, but definitely
antipathetic. And secondly, even when the social scien-
tist has overcome this resistance, extreme practical diffi-
culties remain. Somehow he must disentangle the single
causes from the multiple field of which they form an in-
separable part. And for this a new technique is necessary.

Next, and in many ways even more important than the
first two together, comes the question of bias. Under this
head I include anything appertaining to the investigator
which may deflect his scientific judgment. It is the equi-
valent of experimental and observational error in natural
science. In natural science, there are statistical methods
for discounting both sampling error and personal error;
the limits of accurate measurement are determined for
different types of instrument; the procedure of controlled
experimentation has been reduced to a fine art. The pro-
cedure of the discounting of error in natural science by
these methods has proved difficult enough. But to dis-
cover how to discount bias in social science is proving
very much harder.

Then there is the inherent genetic bias imposed by his
own temperament. For certain purposes, investigators in

227

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

social science are their own instruments to a very great
extent, and in a way unknown in natural science — and the
individual instruments differ in their very construction.

Next we have the bias introduced by the peculiar psy-
chological development of human beings. They can only
resolve their inevitable conflicts during childhood and
adolescence by relegating a great deal to their unconscious,
whether by the psychological mechanism of suppression or
that of repression. Roughly speaking, the former intro-
duces bias by leaving gaps in a person’s knowledge and
outlook, whereas in the latter the gaps are accompanied by
strong emotional distortions and resistances. The scien-
tific study of sex, for instance, has been much retarded by
repressional bias — witness the reception originally given
to Havelock Ellis’s great work and the extraordinary re-
sistance still offered to Freud’s ideas.

Bias of this type has the additional danger that those
who make an effort to discount it may readily swing into
over-compensation — a bias of opposite sign. The in-
vestigator whose youth was tormented by intolerant re-
ligion is apt to discount the social importance of religion
far too much; the convert to Freudian methods is liable,
in discounting his own early sexual repressions, to under-
estimate the social value of repression in general.

Bias has also been encountered in natural science, but
only when its findings come up against emotionally held
convictions — only, that is, when it has had social entangle-
ments. We may cite the prohibition of anatomical dissec-
tion, the proscription of Galileo’s findings, the hostility to
the Darwinian theory, the Nazi distortion of racial an-
thropology, the Soviet attack on modern genetics. The
present course of general anti-scientific feeling, so notice-

228

SCIENCE, NATURAL AND SOCIAL

able during the past decade, has been due in part to a
general feeling that scientific findings, by sapping the
traditional view of man’s place in the universe and in
society, are undermining the basis of ordered society.

Finally, there comes the most fundamental difference
of all. Values are deliberately excluded from the purview
of natural science: values and all that they connote of
motive, emotion, qualitative hierarchy and the rest con-
stitute some of the most important data with which the
social scientist must deal. But how can science deal with
them? Science must aim at quantitative treatment: how
can it deal with the irreducible absolutes of quality?
Science must be morally neutral and dispassionate: how
can the social scientist handle the ethical bases of morality,
the motives of passion ?

Let us be frank with ourselves. There is a sense in
which, because of this qualitative difference between its
data and those of natural science, social science can never
become fully and rigorously scientific. To understand
and describe a system involving values is impossible with-
out some judgment of values, and still more impossible
without such value-judgment is the other scientific func-
tion, that of control.

However, this is not quite so serious as at first sight
appears. Even in natural science, regarded as pure know-
ledge, one value-judgment is implicit — belief in the value
of truth. And where natural science passes into control, a
whole scale of values is involved. The application of
natural science is guided by considerations of utility —
utility for profit, for war, for food-production, for health,
for amusement, for education. The application of science
through the instrument of laisser-fairc economic systems

229

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

has brought us to a position at which we are being forcibly
reminded that these different utilities may conflict.

Put in another way, this is because natural science, by
the fact of being applied, becomes a social problem and so
a subject for social science. In social science, to set up a
new value-system is in certain ways analogous to advancing
a new hypothesis in natural science, and to demonstrate
that such a new system is desirable or necessary is to
discover and formulate some of the Maws of nature’ for
the coming phase of social evolution.

Thus, rather crudely, we may say that in respect of the
problem of values, social science in its aspect of knowledge
is faced by the same difficulties as is natural science in its
aspect of control. The difficulty is thus in a sense an arti-
ficial one. Its consideration has reminded us that natural
science is not such a pure disembodied activity as is often
assumed. Language is in part responsible for the assump-
tion. There is no such thing as natural science per se .
The phrase is a shorthand description of those activities of
human beings which are concerned with understanding and
controlling their natural environment. And, just as simple
one-to-one causation is a fiction, only approximated to in
artificially isolated systems, so the emancipation of natural
science from considerations of value is a fiction, approxi-
mated to by the possibility of temporarily and artificially
isolating scientific activity from other human activities.

The essential differences between natural and social
science thus boil down to this — that the phenomena with
which the latter deals are less readily isolated, and that as
an activity it is more closely entangled with human values.
These differences, however, even if only qualitative, are
very real, and it remains true that social science must

230

SCIENCE, NATURAL AND SOCIAL

develop its own methodology if it is to become an efficient
instrument.

In regard to multiple causation, we may look forward
to an extended use of techniques of mathematical correla-
tion. These have already been developed to a high pitch
for dealing with problems of multiple causation in physical
science, and special methods have been worked out by
Spearman and his school for dealing with psychological
questions. The use of probability methods is also indi-
cated. Here again, these have been developed to a high
pitch for use in natural science. Mathematical methods
also enter into another technique which is now being
rapidly developed in social science, that of the question-
naire, and especially the set of questions asked by the
trained interviewer. The questionnaire method is widely
used, but the reluctance or inability of large sections of the
public to fill up its elaborate forms restricts its sphere and
impairs its sampling accuracy. The success of the method
in this form depends chiefly on two things — the proper
framing of the questions and the obtaining of a truly repre-
sentative sample of the population to answer them.

Some questions do not admit of a significant answer, or
any answer at all; others will defeat their own ends by
influencing the form of the answer. In any case, the
method of questioning a representative sample of a large
population can only be applied to a restricted set of pro-
blems, though within limitations it may become extremely
efficient. The modern scientific public opinion poll,
indeed, is developing such uncanny accuracy that it is
infringing upon practical politics. Some people are ask-
ing whether a properly conducted straw ballot could not
be profitably substituted for the trouble and expense of a

231

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

full election; while others feel that the announcement of
a straw vote may itself influence the course of the subse-
quent election.

Psychologists are busy devising modifications of the
questionnaire method so as to build up objective rating
scales (objective, that is, for the population of which the
questionees are a representative sample) for various value-
judgments. In addition, they are essaying to assess the
distribution 'among the population of various human
qualities. Intelligence-testing has long been practised,
and is now approaching full scientific validity. Attempts
are also being made to assess temperament and even more
elusive qualities. The method of Mass Observation con-
stitutes an attempt to attain objective information on
various aspects of public opinion and behaviour which
elude the method of yes-and-no questioning. Inquiries
may concern the reaction of the public to a particular
place, like the Zoo or the National Gallery; to a particular
event, like the Coronation; to a particular activity, such
as smoking or the time of rising ; or to a general situation,
like that of war. In some cases, composite pictures which
could have been obtained in no other way have resulted
from the use of this method. But in general its technique,
both as regards sampling and questioning, will have to be
refined a good deal before it can claim to be scientifically
dependable.

Another set of methods which are being developed to
cope with the complexity of social problems are those of
anonymous group working, repeated drafting, and cir-
culation of the preliminary draft results for comment and
criticism. A combination of all three seems to yield the
best results when tackling large and many-sided problems, ♦

232

SCIENCE, NATURAL AND SOCIAL

such as the structure of a national agency like a health ser-
vice or a big industry like steel or agriculture, the organiz-
ation of leisure, or international adjustments.

Joint work is on the increase in natural science, but here
largely because of the quantitative burden of routine pro-
cedures in subjects like biochemistry or genetics. We
may distinguish such work from true group work, using
the term group in the sense of a body of people pooling
their different knowledges and skills to cope with quali-
tatively differentiated problems. Group work in this sense
is also to be found in natural science, as when geneticists,
ecologists and statisticians make a united attack on some
problem of micro-evolution. But it is far more necessary
in social science, where various bodies, such as P.E.P.,
are studying how to perfect it as a research method.
Anonymity is often desirable in group work to enable
the participation of public servants or well-known men
whose opinions might be distorted or discounted in ad-
vance. It may also be desirable, for an essentially opposite
reason, to give the weight of a recognized study organiza-
tion to the work of young and unknown men whose
findings would otherwise tend to be disregarded. In both
these ways anonymous group working, in addition to
securing greater efficiency, helps to discount bias of one
sort or another.

Provided that a good drafter is available, together with a
chairman and a small core of members who will give
regular attendance, group membership can be fluid, and
specialists invited for one or a few meetings as required.

Repeated drafting is a substitute for experimentation in
problems where the experimental attack is ruled out. As
soon as a preliminary survey has been made of the problem

2 33

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

in its entirety, a draft is circulated for discussion at the
next meeting. The gaps and errors thus brought to light
form the subject of the next period of work, when the pro-
cess is repeated. Three, four, or even more complete
drafts may be required before publishable conclusions are
reached, just as new sets of experiments must be planned
and executed to deal with tentative conclusions and new
facts arising in a piece of research in natural science,
before it can be written up.

Some or all of the successive drafts may also be cir-
culated to a comparatively large number of outside experts
for written criticism. The collation of such comments
often brings to light new details and unexpected points of
view which the group, in its preoccupation with its own
trend of thought, has overlooked. It affords a method of
enlarging the group without the time-consuming business
of large-scale discussion.

In other cases, the actual investigator may be a single
man, while the group element is provided by interviews
and by circulation of drafts. This method is best adapted
to problems which are of large geographical scale and local
diversity, though it may also be used for those which are
qualitatively diversified in themselves.

It may be expected that the working out of various
techniques made necessary by the nature of the data of
social science will have fruitful repercussions in certain
fields of natural science, such as evolution and comparative
biological study in general, where the present bias in
favour of experimental work and specific results is leaving
vast bodies of published data awaiting the synthetic treat-
ment which only organized group attack can provide.

I have already mentioned certain substitutes for the

*34

SCIENCE, NATURAL AND SOCIAL

controlled experimentation of the natural sciences. But
experimentation as a method is not ruled out in social
science, though it must take different forms. Regional or
group experimentation is the most obvious method. Two
regions or groups are chosen which are as similar as
possible, and certain measures are introduced in the one,
while the other serves as control. The Carlisle experi-
ment on liquor control in Britain was an early essay in this
method, but unfortunately it has been allowed to drag on
without any serious attempts to draw theoretical conclu-
sions or to frame practical policies on the basis of its
operation. The T.V.A. in America is perhaps the largest
social experiment ever undertaken, at any rate in a non-
totalitarian country. The area involved, however, is so
large that strict controls are difficult to find.

As the spirit of scientific planning extends with govern-
ment, we may expect to see regional experiments tried out
in many fields. Medical and health services would afford
another excellent field. The social results of cheap electric
power could be made the subject of local experiments
much more rigorous than that of the T.V.A. Different
methods of developing backward tropical territories — by
international or national chartered companies, by public
works schemes under the local administration, by the
establishment of co-operatives— could and should be made
the subject of carefully planned regional experiments.

The fact that in social science man is his own guinea-pig
has a number of methodological consequences, both for
social science research and for its practical applications.
The social scientist often requires true co-operation from
his material in the sense of understanding of the reason for
his work and voluntary participation in its course. Educa-

*35

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

tion as a social experiment can never succeed without
properly equipped teachers, specially trained in pedagogy.
The interview method will give entirely misleading results
without interviewers skilled in the technique of their job.

In the field of application, propaganda and public rela-
tions may be of prime importance. A good example is the
cancer campaign recently instituted in the United States.
Cancer has been presented to the public in such a way as to
create a real interest in it as a social problem, and the public
is collaborating in the attack upon it. The vast problem of
malnutrition will never be solved unless the public is made
to take a similar interest in it. The British Medical Asso-
ciation has made a beginning in this field with its milk
campaign ; but it is a beginning only.

In general the whole technique of propaganda, per-
suasion, and public relations needs the most intensive
study before the findings of science can be socially applied.
When does propaganda defeat its own ends by setting up
counter-resistance ? What are the relative values of reiter-
ation and of variety of appeal ? Of the printed word, the
poster, the cinema, or the radio ? Of rational persuasion
as against mere suggestibility? Of intellectual compre-
hension as against a sense of active participation? We
simply do not know, and until we know, our progress
towards efficient social structure and a fuller life will be
fitful and slow. In many ways, the enlistment of public
co-operation is to social science what the enlistment of
capital investment is to natural science: it provides
motive power for application. .

There remains the question of bias. In this there is no
ready method to hand. It took generations for natural
science to work out the technique of discounting ex!peri-

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SCIENCE, NATURAL AND SOCIAL

mental and observational error; it will take generations for
social science to work out that of discounting the errors due
to bias. The first step is obviously to make the world aware
of the existence of bias and of the need for its discounting.
Where human affairs are still handled in a pre-scientific
spirit, bias is apt to play a very large practical r6le, especi-
ally the bias in favour of one’s own group, whether class,
religion or race. Such bias produces powerful rationaliza-
tions, which are then used to justify policies of the merest
self-interest. The enslavement of negroes was justified
on the basis of the scriptural authority for the menial
destiny jof the sons of Ham ; the brutalities of the Nazi
Jew-baitings on that of the racial superiority of 4 Aryans.*
The group bias of the prosperous classes in early nine-
teenth-century England appeared in astonishing asser-
tions about the inherent inferiority of 4 the poor*; the
same bias is evident in certain aspects of the eugenics
movement to-day.

Another widespread and disastrous form of bias arises
from psychological conflict and tension. Censoriousness
in respect of moral taboos, the desire to see the infliction
of vindictive punishment, the unconscious reluctance of
many parents to see the harsh school discipline under
which they suffered replaced by humaner methods, the
emotional basis of militarism — all these and many other
undesirable determiners of human conduct are the result
of bias arising from repression or emotional conflict and
the inflicting of lasting distortion on the psyche.

In these fields, bias is thus an urgent subject for investi-
gation by social science, and the application here will lie in
making its findings universally known and accepted by
the public in general and by administrators in particular.

2 37

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

But even in scientific circles bias may play a surprisingly
large part. A good example was the resistance of the
great majority of medical men during the early part of the
last war to admitting any cause for breakdown among
soldiers save physical shell-shock and malingering. And
the uncritical assumption, even among scrupulously care-
ful persons, that differences in intelligence between social
classes were genetic and not due to nutrition or other
social factors, is another. Again, we have the thesis of
anthropologists like L^vy-Bruhl, that savage mentality is
in some way qualitatively different from and inferior to our
own, whereas it is in fact essentially similar, but operating
in different material and social conditions.

No golden rule can be laid down for the avoidance of
such pitfalls, apart from the obvious step of realizing that
they exist. Beyond that, special methods must be worked
out in each field.

Voices are still raised proclaiming that social science is
a contradiction in terms, that human affairs are not intrin-
sically amenable to the scientific method. Those who
hold this opinion are, I believe, wrong. They are confus-
ing the methods of natural science with scientific method
in general. Social science differs inevitably from natural
science in many important respects, notably in its lesser
capacity for isolating problems, and more generally in its
lesser degree of isolation from other aspects of human
activity and its consequent greater entanglement with
problems of value. It must therefore work out its own
technique and its own methodology, just as natural science
had to do after Bacon and the eager amateurs of the seven-
teenth century had glimpsed natural science as a new form
of human activity.

* 3 8

SCIENCE, NATURAL AND SOCIAL

Let us not forget that the working out of this technique
and this methodology by natural science took a great deal
of time and is indeed still progressing. During the growth
of modern science, the amateur has been largely replaced
by the professional; university laboratories have been
supplemented by governmental and industrial institu-
tions ; whole-time research has become a new profession ;
the team has in many types of work replaced the indi-
vidual; co-operative group work is beginning; and the
large-scale planning of research is in the offing.

Finally, the enormous growth of applied science has
had effects of the utmost importance on pure research. It
has done so partly by providing new instruments which
would otherwise have been unavailable; one need only
instance the gifts of the wireless industry not only to pure
physics but to such unexpected branches of science as
nervous physiology. And partly by suggesting new lines
of research, the needs of wireless have again revealed new
facts concerning the upper atmosphere, while the study of
plant pests and human diseases has brought to light new
modes of evolution.

We need have no fear for the future of social science.
It too will pass through similar phases from its present
infancy. By the time that the profession of social science,
pure and applied, includes as many men and women as are
now engaged in natural science, it will have solved its
major problems of new methods, and the results it has
achieved will have altered the whole intellectual climate.
As the barber-surgeon of the Middle Ages has given place
to the medical man of to-day, with his elaborate scientific
training, so the essentially amateur politician and adminis-
trator of to-day will have been replaced by a new type of

*39

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

professional man, with specialized training. Life will go
on against a background of social science. Society will
have begun to develop a brain.

II. The Biological Analogy

Writers and philosophers have often attempted to illu-
minate human affairs by means of biological analogies.
Shakespeare, in Coriolanus , drew the analogy between the
human body and the body politic in Menenius* speech on
the body and its members. Herbert Spencer’s work is
shot through with the premise that human biology is but
an extension of biology sensu stricto , and that, accordingly,
biological analogies will in general have validity. Various
German philosophers during the latter half of the past
century justified war on the basis of the Darwinian concep-
tion of the struggle for existence, and the apostles of
laisser-fairc in Britain found support for economic indi-
vidualism in the same doctrine. Socialists, on the other
hand, have pointed to the fact of mutual aid in nature, as
set forth by Kropotkin. Analogies with the social organ-
ization of ants and bees have been used, according to taste
and prejudice, to glorify or to attack the doctrines of
human collectivism. The Marxist thesis of progress being
achieved through a reconciliation of opposites, only to lead
to a new antithesis, which in turn paves the way for a new
synthesis, is customarily documented in the works of
communist philosophers by examples from biological
evolution.

It is interesting to ask ourselves precisely what validity
resides in this method of extending biological principles
by analogy into human affairs. At the outset, it is clear

240

SCIENCE, NATURAL AND SOCIAL

that analogy, unless applied with the greatest caution, is a
dangerous tool. This is clear to the modern scientist, but
it has not always been so. Indeed, to put too great a bur-
den on the back of analogy is a fundamental temptation of
the human mind, and is at the base of the most unscientific
practices and beliefs, including almost all magical ritual
and much of supernaturalist superstition. During the last
millennium, moralists, theologians and scholastic phil-
osophers have often regarded analogy, even of the most
far-fetched kind, as the equivalent of proof.

Has analogy, then, no part to play in scientific thought ?
Far from it. Analogy is in the majority of cases the clue
which guides the scientific explorer towards radically new
discoveries, the light which serves as first indication of a
distant region habitable by thought. The analogy with
waves in water guided physics to the classical wave-theory
of light. The analogy with human competition, after play-
ing an important role in Darwinian theory (did not Darwin
arrive at the theory of natural selection from his reading of
Malthus ?), was transferred by Wilhelm Roux to a smaller
sphere, the struggle of the parts within the individual.

But analogy may very readily mislead. Weismann
sought to apply this same analogy of intra-organismal
struggle and selection to the units df heredity; but the
analogy happens not to hold good. The analogy of a
stream of particles misled Newton as to the nature of light.

Analogy thus provides clues, but they may easily be
false clues ; it provides light, but the light may be a will-
of-the-wisp. However pretty, however seductive, analogy
remains analogy and never constitutes proof. It throws
out suggestions, which must be tested before we can speak
of demonstration.

241

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

But if non-scientists often overrate the importance of
analogy, scientists themselves tend to be over-cautious and
to underrate its potential value. Its value is especially
great when the analogy is one between closely related sub-
jects. The analogy between the evolution of different
groups of animals is often surprisingly close, for the simple
reason that both the material and the conditions are essen-
tially similar throughout. None the less, unpredictable
results are not infrequent. The adaptive radiation of the
marsupials in Australia was in its broad lines similar
to that of the placentals in the rest of the world; but
the placentals never developed large jumpers like the
kangaroo, and, conversely, the marsupials produced no
quick runners like horse or antelope, and no freshwater
fish-eaters like the otter. Again, the parallelism in the
social evolution of the quite unrelated ants and termites is
truly astonishing; yet the termites have never produced
grain-storers or slave-makers, while the ants have no
system of second-grade queens in reserve.

One further caveat before we pursue the biological an-
alysis of man’s social existence. Human societies, though
indubitably organic, are unlike any animal organism in the
mode of their reproduction. Strictly speaking, they do
not usually reproduce at all, but merely perpetuate them-
selves. They exhibit no process of fertilization between
living gametes, no distinction between mortal body and
immortal germ-plasm. They continue indefinitely by the
aggregate reproduction of their component individuals.
In their development, change of structural and functional
pattern can be dissociated from growth in a way impos-
sible to a developing animal, and social heredity operates
via cultural transmission, not by the physical transmission

242

SCIENCE, NATURAL AND SOCIAL

of material potencies of development. On the other hand,
the separation of phylogeny and ontogeny, the develop-
ment of the race and the development of the individu al,
which is so evident in higher animals, is blurred in social
development to such an extent that the two often coincide.

All analogies between the birth, development and death
of civilizations or nations and of animal organisms must be
very heavily discounted because of this fundamental differ-
ence in the mode of their reproduction and inheritance.

Now, with these facts in mind, let us look at some of
the biological analogies that lie near to hand. In the first
place, there is the analogy between the societies of insects
and those of man. This, however obvious and however
often applied, must be rejected out of hand. The two rest
on different bases — those of ants, bees and termites on the
fixity of instinct, those of man on the plasticity of intelli-
gence. For this reason man cannot and will not ever
develop specialized castes, with functions predetermined
by heredity, nor will human society ever work with the
machine-like smoothness of an ant-hill or a termitary.
Furthermore, we must qot expect that in man the altru-
istic instincts will ever become predominant: as Haldane
has demonstrated, this can only occur when neuter castes
of workers or soldiers exist. Altruism in man must be
fostered by education and given fuller play by appropriate
social machinery; it cannot be implanted once and for all
by heredity.

The next analogy to be considered is that between the
body of a higher animal and human society. This has
taken two main forms. In the one, the analogy is drawn
between the main classes of society and the main organ-
systems of the body, or, going a little further into detail,

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

between the specialized functions of various agencies of
social existence — trade, government, war, education and
so forth — and those of particular bodily organs. In the
other, which has been attempted only since the discovery
of the cell and the rise of the cell-theory, the cell within the
body is compared to the individual within society. An
extension of this second analogy bridges the gap between
it and the first: instead of the individual cell, attention is
concentrated on the different types of cells and the differ-
ent resultant tissues of the body; and these, rather than
the still more complex organs, each composed of numer-
ous tissues, are compared with the various specialized
trades and professions in human society.

In assessing the value and limitations of these analyses,
we must begin by recalling the basic difference between
the animal body and human society, namely, the far
greater subordination of the parts to the whole in the
former. This is especially important for the comparison
between cells and human individuals. The difference
here is the same basic one as that between the castes of a
social insect society and the specialized aptitudes of human
beings, but pushed to a much greater length. The cells
of the body are irrevocably specialized during early de-
velopment, and their divergent specialization is far greater
than that between even a queen and a soldier termite.
Without embryological study, no one could guess that a
nerve-cell, with its long nerve-fibre and its branching den-
drites, a sperm, with condensed head and motile tail, and
a fat-cell, an inert lump crowded with globules of reserve
fat-stores, were all modifications of a single common type.
Altruism, in the sense of sacrifice of the unit for the good
of the whole, has also been carried to a milch higher pitch.

*44

SCIENCE, NATURAL AND SOCIAL

As with drone bees, only one out of many sperms can ever
perform its fertilizing function; but the ratio is one to many
tens of millions, instead of one to a few hundreds. The
cells of the outer skin have no other function than to be
converted into dead horny plates, constantly shed and as
constantly renewed ; the red blood-cells lose their nuclei
before being capable of exerting their oxygen-carrying
function, and have a life much more limited even than
that of worker bees. Units may even be pooled. The
giant nerve-fibres of cuttlefish are the joint product of
numerous united nerve-cells; our own striped muscle-
fibres are vast super-units, comparable with a perman-
ently united tug-of-war team.

In terms of biologically higher and lower, there is thus
a radical difference between cells and human beings. Both
are biological individuals which form part of more complex
individualities. Cells are first-order individuals, bodies
second-order ones, and human societies (like hydroid
colonies or bee-hives) third-order ones. But whereas the
individuality of the body of a higher animal, be it cuttle-
fish, insect or vertebrate, is far more developed than that
of its constituent cells, that of a human society is far less
so than that of its individual units.

This fact, while it makes the analogy between cell and
human individual almost worthless, is of great value itself
as a biological analogy, since it immediately exposes the
fallacy of all social theories, like those of Fascism and
National Socialism, which exalt the State above the in-
dividual.

A book could be written on the subject of analogies be-
tween biological organisms and society. One with pecu-
liar relevance to-day is the tendency, repeated over and

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

over again in evolution, for types to specialize on the
development of brute strength coupled with formidable
offensive or defensive weapons, only to be superseded by
other types which had concentrated on efficiency of gen-
eral organization, and especially on the efficiency of the
brain. The outstanding example is the supersession of
the formidable reptiles of the late Mesozoic by the appar-
ently insignificant mammals of the period.

This phenomenon is often somewhat misinterpreted
as the replacement of specialized by generalized types.
There is an element of truth in this idea, but the fact is
often lost sight of that the successful generalized type
always owes its success to some improvement in basic
organization. Such improvements in general organiza-
tion are specializations, but they are all-round specializa-
tions, whereas what are usually called specializations are
one-sided. This distinction contains the kernel of what is
probably the most important of our biological analogies —
the analogy concerning desirable and undesirable direc-
tions of change.

A detailed analysis of type of evolutionary change shows
that some of them can legitimately be called progressive,
in the sense that they constitute part of a steady advance
on the part of living matter toward a greater control over
and independence of its environment. Only a small and
steadily diminishing fraction of life participates in pro-
gressive change.

Each step in progress is constituted by all-round
specialization — an improvement in general organization ;
one-sided specialization always leads into an evolutionary
blind alley.

Here I have only space to mention the two types of
246

SCIENCE, NATURAL AND SOCIAL

change which have been most important in the later phases
of evolutionary progress. One is the development of
mechanisms for regulating the internal environment of an
animal, and so making it more largely independent of
changes in external environment or better able to pass
from one type of activity to another. The other is the
improvement of the mechanisms for obtaining and utiliz-
ing knowledge of the environment, which in its later
stages, after the efficiency of sense-organs had reached its
limit, has been brought about by improvement in brain
mechanism.

The biological analogy from the former is obvious. It
provides the most abundant justification for the abandon-
ment of laisser-faire in favour of social and economic plan-
ning : but the planning must be designed to give society an
internal environment which shall be both stable in essen-
tials and flexible in detail, and to enable it to undertake the
greatest diversity of functions with the least dislocation.

The biological analogy from brain evolution is, how-
ever, even more illuminating. As animal evolution con-
tinued, the avenues of progress were cut off one by one.
Changes that had been progressive in their time were ex-
ploited to the full and reached the limit of their potential-
ities. Mere bulk of body had reached its limit in the
dinosaurs during the Mesozoic, some sixty million years
ago. Ten or twenty million years later, temperature-regu-
lation in certain animal forms had been perfected. The
exploitation of the insectan type of social life by ants was
over about twenty-five million years back, and ants have
not evolved since.

Similarly, the number of the groups which might share
in progressive change steadily narrowed down. Groups

*47

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

like the echinoderms were soon eliminated owing to their
headlessness; then the great phylum of molluscs, through
defects in general organization ; then the insects, through
their limited size. Only the vertebrates remained. The
cold-blooded forms were eliminated by the biological in-
vention of temperature-regulation ; the birds, by their over-
specialization for flight; the marsupials, by their greatly
inferior reproductive mechanism. Among the placentals,
now sole repositories of potential advance, the majority of
lines cut themselves off from progress by one-sided special-
ization. Only the arboreal primates escaped, since their
mode of life left teeth and limbs unspecialized, while de-
manding greater efficiency in the highest sense of all, vision,
and greater correlation between hand and eye. This ~orre-
lation meant improvement in brain structure, which spilled
over in the form of increased educability and awareness.
Finally, all the primate lines but one wandered into blind
alleys, becoming over-specialized for tree life. Only the
one stock which early redescended to the ground and con-
centrated on all-round adaptability remained potentially
progressive — man. The human species has now become
the only branch of life in which and by which further sub-
stantial evolutionary progress can possibly be realized.
And it has achieved this enviable, but at the same time
intensely responsible, position solely by concentrating on
brain as against other organs as its line of specialization.

This evolution of brain, as the one inexhaustible or at
least unexhausted source of progress, thus demands our
closest attention as a biological analogy for social affairs.
With some simplification, the process of brain evolution in
vertebrates is resolvable into two main steps — first, the
addition of two centres of correlation in different parts of

248

SCIENCE, NATURAL AND SOCIAL

the brain, one for the correlation of sensory knowledge,
the other for the correlation of action, and of course with
the two centres united by communicating cables. This
is the stage arrived at in fish. The next step was the pro-
vision of a further quite new centre of correlation, super-
imposed on the previous mechanism. This organ of
ultimate adjustment and control consists of the cerebral
hemispheres, which are wholly unrepresented in the lowest
vertebrates. Its essential exchange mechanism consists of
the cerebral cortex. So far as we know, the cortex, in spite
of all localizations and functional specializations within it,
always acts as a whole, in the sense that its activity can be
thought of as a complex field which is altered in its total
functioning by any alteration in any of its parts.

The final step between ape and man is marked by the
great enlargement of those areas of the brain which have
the least specialized function — the so-called association
areas, which lie between the regions wherein are localized
the reception of relayed sensory information and the emis-
sion of executive messages for action. It is this, it seems,
which has made possible self-consciousness and true con-
ceptual thought.

During the course of their evolution, the cerebral hemi-
spheres increased from zero to a mass which exceeds that of
all the rest of the central nervous system taken together,
and became one of the larger organs of the body.

Our brain analogy undoubtedly illuminates the social
problem in an extremely valuable way. In the first place,
the highest stage of evolution in this respect which has as
yet been reached by any society is, by biological standards,
extremely primitive. It corresponds with a quite early
stage in the development of cerebral hemispheres and cor-

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

tex: higher than that of a fish, but certainly not beyond
that found in reptiles. Before humanity can obtain on the
collective level that degree of foresight, control, and flexi-
bility which on the biological level is at the disposal of
human individuals, it must multiply at least tenfold, per-
haps fiftyfold, the proportion of ihdividuals and organiza-
tions devoted to obtaining information, to planning, cor-
relation, and the flexible control of execution. The chief
increases are needed in respect of correlation and planning
and of social self-consciousness. In these respects, wholly
new social organs must be evolved, whose nature we can
only envisage in the most general terms.

In respect of planning and correlation, we can dimly
perceive that some large single central organization must
be superposed on the more primitive system of separate
government departments and other single-function organ-
izations; and that this, like the cerebral cortex, must be at
one and the same time unified and functionally specialized.
It will thus contain units concerned with particular social
and economic functions, but the bulk of its personnel will
be occupied in studying and effecting the interrelations
between these various functions.

As regards social self-consciousness, the course of evo-
lution must be quite different. Newspapers and books,
radio, universal education — these and other points of
technological and social advance have given us, in primi-
tive form, the mechanisms needed. At the moment, how-
ever, they are being, in the light of biological analogy,
largely misapplied. Education stops dead for most people
in early adolescence, and concerns itself mainly with pro-
viding specialized techniques, together with a froth of
obsolescent ‘culture.’ The cinema to-day is primarily an

250

SCIENCE, NATURAL AND SOCIAL

escape mechanism. Newspapers distort the balance of
truth in the service of political or financial interests, and
are driven by competition for advertising into sensation-
mongering. The radio is as yet essentially a collection of
scraps, a functional patchwork. Art as a communal func-
tion is moribund and needs to be recreated on a new social
basis. Religion is in a similar position, and much of the
population no longer feels its influence.

The first need is to recognize that, in this increasingly
complex world, a free country cannot exist, let alone find
satisfaction, without being self-conscious, and all the agen-
cies of public opinion must be moulded to this end. A
self-conscious society would be one in which every indi-
vidual comprehended the aims of society, his own part in
the whole, the possibilities of intellectual, artistic and
moral satisfaction open to him, his role in the collective
knowledge and will. But for this, as for correlation or
planned control, the most elaborate organization is re-
quired.

Meanwhile our social planners would undoubtedly
benefit from a study of the evolution of individuality in
animals, and still more from an intensive course in the
comparative neurology of vertebrates.

XII

THE ANALYSIS OF FAME
(WRITTEN AS A REVIEW OF WHO'S WHO, 1935)

W ho really is who? Who, indeed? JVho's IVho
should provide the answer, at least so far as concerns
society’s collective Who in Britain. The trouble is that
the answer is so collective, so formidably vast. The
present edition runs to 3694 pages of entries, involving
something like 30,000 miniature biographies.

Obviously there are numerous methods for approaching
our problem of who really is who, and why. As a scien-
tist, I fed that the quantitative method should first be
given a chance. There are plenty of interesting questions
to which it could provide an answer. For instance: —
How many foreigners does the editor admit within the
British precinct? In what proportion are the different
professions and occupations represented in this Annual
Hall of Fame ? Are these proportions sensibly different
for the British-born and the foreigners ? What relation, if
any, does length of entry bear to degree of eminence?
What are the proportions of the sexes, both in bulk and
detail ?

I cannot claim to have penetrated very far along this
road, but I have made a beginning. I have taken a random
sample of over two hundred names, under a couple of
letters of the alphabet, and present a few facts resulting
from its preliminary analysis.

The Army, to my surprise, comes an easy first, with 34
entries out of 222. The mere fact of belonging to the

252

THE ANALYSIS OF FAME

Aristocracy tics for second place with Religion — 19 each.
Literature also accounts for 19, but only when it is en-
larged by journalism and publishing. Then come Foreign
and Imperial administration, including the diplomatic and
consular services (17); Finance and Business (16); Science
and Engineering (15); representatives of academic learn-
ing in other fields than science (14); Home politics and
administration (13); the Navy, surprisingly low, with 12;
Medicine (10); the Fine Arts, Music, and Architecture
(8); Education (8); Miscellaneous (7); Law (6); the
Air Force and Aviation in general (3) ; and last the Drama,
including both acting and management, with only 2. (The
Miscellaneous, by the way, include a food expert, a girl-
guide organizer, and a traveller.)

The male sex-ratio is very high. In fact, there are only
6 women in the sample, or less than 3 per cent., and 4 of
these are in literature.

Non-Britishers are much more generously treated than
mere females, there being 26 of them. Ten of these are
from the United States, 9 are Hindus, 4 Europeans,
2 from the British Dominions, and one is a native
African.

However, the selection of representatives of foreign
countries is curiously haphazard. For instance, Heming-
way is in, but not Faulkner; Sherwood Anderson, but not
Stark Young; William Beebe, but not Thomas Barbour;
Lindbergh, but not Professor Piccard; Frankie Buchman
of the Oxford Groups, but not Aimde Semple MacPherson ;
Edith Wharton, but not Gertrude Stein ; Charles Seltzer
(author of The Boss of the Lazy T ’, etc., etc.), but not
Christopher Morley; Mary Garden, but not Lawrence
Tibbett; General Smuts, but not General Botha; Ethel

253

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Barrymore, but not Ruth Draper ; the Abb6 Dimnet, but
not Ogden Nash. ... It is all very mysterious.

This quantitative method of study is capable of almost
indefinite extension. In fact, it might be good for the
progress of science if for a year, say, our army of socio-
logists were to relinquish all other research, and make a
vast co-operative study, intensive, extensive, and com-
parative, of the ‘Who's Whos' of the world.

There is the question of Clubs, for instance. What sort
of men are those without a single club, and those who be-
long to more than one ? Is there as much correlation as is
popularly supposed between clubs and professions — the
Athenaeum and the upper ranges of an ecclesiastical career,
for instance, or the Authors' and the practice of literature?
There is further the question of recreation. What sort of
men, on the average, are they who have no recreations, or
at least do not record them ? Of what type are the com-
paratively rare few who comply with editorial request and
insert their motor-car numbers ? What types of men and
women omit to state their ages ?

On all these and many other points of absorbing interest
Who's Who could provide an answer if only sociological
science would undertake the research. Unfortunately,
the statistical labour involved is too great for an unaided
worker, and I must pass on to the less precise but none the
less absorbing facts to be gained by the merely qualitative
methods of browsing and pouncing.

I cannot pretend, for example, to any precision of result
on the question of length of entry. For a considerable
time, I thought that the record was held by Nicholas
Murray Butler — a proud position for a foreigner to hold
among alien hosts! But he is exceeded, by another Bu y

*54

THE ANALYSIS OF FAME

curiously enough — Sir Ernest Wallis Budge, the archaeo-
logist, who runs to 165 lines against N. M. B.'s 135 (and
this in spite of the list of the latter's foreign orders running
to 20 lines).

However, it is true that the United States entries tend
to be on the long side. Professor Rice of the Peabody
Museum gets (or perhaps one should say takes) 108 lines:
by the way, he achieves what appears to be a record in the
matter of club memberships, listing 22 (as against the
mere 16 of Will Hays). Harry Elmer Barnes has 106;
Irving Fisher 89 (as against H. A. L. Fisher's humble 42).
That is three American ‘centenarians': among other
nationals I can find but one — Monsieur Bouchor, French
artist (102); and in the ranks of the far more numerous
British I can only trace seven.

By way of contrast with these long entries we find that
even Mr H. G. Wells's formidable list of publications (he
does not, however, cite his articles) only gives him 84 lines,
while Shaw has 65; Mussolini and General Smuts are
content with 32, the Rockefellers, Sen. and Jun., with 29
and 18 respectively, Lloyd George with 21, Franklin
Roosevelt with 18. However, for real restraint give me
Stalin. Let me quote his entry in full:

STALIN, Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashirli [surely, by the
way, this is one of fVho's fVho's rare misprints: should it not be ‘
Djugashvili ?], b. Gori, Tiflis Province, 1879; m. Nadejda
Sergeyevna Alleluya(d. 1932); twoc. Address: The Kremlin,
Moscow, Russia.

I suppose, however, this entry is an editorial produc-
tion. For personal modesty give me Professor Griquard,
who, though he once divided the Nobel Prize for Chemistry,
takes up but 5 lines. I like too his publication: — ‘Traits

2 55

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN
dc Chimic Organique (io vols.), commenccra k paraitre
Cn I934/

No, the correspondence between length of eptry and
degree of eminence is not high. It is, however, doubtless
positive: I should put the coefficient of correlation at
about o*2, perhaps 0*3.

One curious point is the stern, almost puritanical, atti-
tude taken up by the Editors to the theatre and the screen.
Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks get reasonable
entries. The only producers I can find are Alexander
Korda and Jesse Lasky. Mary Pickford and George
Arliss receive 8 lines each, and the Garbo 5 ; but Marlene
Dietrich, Norma Shearer, Marion Davies, Jean Harlow,
Katharine Hepburn, and even Mae West are absent, as
are Clark Gable, Gilbert, Cagney, and all four of the Marx
Brothers. Even on the stage, and the British stage at that,
there are curious gaps: for instance, I can’t find Leslie
Howard, Diana Wynyard, or Elsa Lanchester.

This is the only general criticism I have of this very
great work. No one can, or at least ought to, deny that
Norma Shearer, Cecil de Mille, or Harpo Marx are most
definitely WHO, much more so than professors and
second-rate novelists, or the hordes of Brigadier-Generals
and Archdeacons.

Another gap concerns royalty. There is a sort of proem
concerning the British Royal Family, but nothing what-
ever concerning other monarchs, which seems a pity, and
also illogical. Even ex-kings, however much in the public
eye, are omitted. The only exceptions to the rule are sub-
ject kings, like the King of Buganda.

Of course, the most obvious source of interest for the
reviewer is to be found under Recreations . For years

256

THE ANALYSIS OF FAME

George Bernard Shaw’s ‘anything except sport’ has been
a classic mot . The Sitwells live up to their reputation for
demanding public notice. Osbert recreates himself by
‘entertaining the rich and charity generally’; Sacheverell
by ‘model aeroplanes, plats rdgionaux, improvisation, the
bull-ring.’ Edith has no specific recreation, but she makes
up for this by giving her antipathies: ‘in early youth took
an intense dislike to simplicity, morris-dancing, a sense
of humour, and every kind of sport except reviewer-bait-
ing, and has continued these distastes ever since.’

The Sitwellian sense of satire is further illuminated by
such entries as this of Sacheverell’s, ‘ educ. Eton Coll.;
Balliol College, Oxford. Left latter owing to continued
success of Gilbert and Sullivan season at, Oxford ; mainly
self-educated.’ Or, even more, by Osbert’s 'educ. during
the holidays from Eton . . . was put down for M.C.C. on
day of birth by W. G. Grace, but has now abandoned all
other athletic interests in order to urge the adoption of
new sports such as: Pelota, Kif-Kif, and the Pengo
(especially the latter).’ Considering the high cost of com-
position, ought not the editors to undertake some cuttinp
in cases such as this ?

Among the recreations of the great are these: — Naomi
Mitchison, ‘hitting back’; E. S. P. Haynes, ‘divorce law
reform’; Sir Denison Ross, ‘languages’ (such busmen’s
holidays are frequent); Evelyn Underhill, the writer
on mysticism, ‘ talking to cats ’; Benito Mussolini, ‘vio-
lino, equitazione, scherma, automobilismo, aviazione’;
A. M. Low, the writer on popular science, ‘the encourage-
ment of scientific research’; Sir William Bowden, the
newspaper proprietor, ‘ lecturing for charitable and educa-
tional purposes’ (golly ! but this is not unique — Professor

*57

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

Henderson of the University of North Carolina, lists
simply ‘public lecturing’); Senator Gogarty of the Irish
Free State, ‘archery and aviation’— delightful combina-
tion; the Rev. Hon. E. Lyttelton, late Headmaster of
Eton, ‘scenery’ (this is curiously rare; perhaps many
people include it under travel ) ; Sean O’Casey, sweepingly
and, it seems to me, rather rashly, ‘everything except
work’; M. E. G. Sebastian, D.S.O., British Consular
Service, ‘needlework’; Athene Seyler, ‘walking, talking.’
It is an interesting commentary on the social conventions
that whereas music is set down quite commonly, and at least
Ernest Hemingway has had the courage to include drinking ,
nowhere can I find either gambling or women as a recreation.

Often the biographies include fascinating facts. A
hint that Epstein may possess an inferiority complex is
given by the remark that his work on the British Medical
Association, though ‘attacked by newspapers, religious
bodies, etc., was defended by Times' It is pleasant to
know that J. D. Rockefeller senior has given away more
than $500,000,000 in charity. It is also pleasant that in
these days of specialization such a paragon of versatility
can exist as Dr Satischandra Bagchi, Principal of the Uni-
versity Law College at Calcutta, who, in addition to numer-
ous legal works, notably on the ‘Juristic Personality of
Hindu Deities,’ has written books on ‘The Mathematics
of Transformation and Quantum Theory’; ‘Rabelais’;
and ‘ Morality in Art,’ besides translating French stories
into Bengali.

It is tempting to browse on. Almost every page has its
rewards. The clergyman whose recreations are caricature
and philately; the fact that Marie Stopes mentions her
marriage to her first husband, but that he does not men-

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THE ANALYSIS OF FAME

tion the fact of his marriage to Marie Stopes; the omission
by H. G. Wells of any mention of the first marriage for
which in his autobiography he finds so much space; the
fact that neither Sir Charles Sherrington nor Miss Ethel
M. Dell give their ages. . . . But I must refrain.

Who's Who is a great work. It is not only so useful as
to be all but indispensable; not only, as I have tried to
point out, one of the world’s most valuable source-books
in sociology; but also contains more interesting speci-
mens of what are usually known as ‘human documents’
than any other work in existence. And if you think the
price is high, reflect that it works out at less than a farthing
per closely printed page — far cheaper than a novel.

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SCIENTIFIC HUMANISM

W hat arc the aims before humanism ? One phrase, to
my mind, really contains them all : to have life and
to have it more abundantly. Although, like all one-phrase
programmes, this needs amplification and definition, it
proclaims at the outset the humanist's main creed: that
the sole source of values which we know of in the universe
is the commerce between mind and matter that we call
human life, for it generates not only our standard of
values but the experiences, objects, and ideas which are
of highest concrete value in themselves ; that life as a whole
is more important than any single part or product of life;
and that since life, however complex, is essentially one, it
is false to give absolute predominance to any system of
ideas or conduct, to any one aspect of life.

A humanism that is also scientific sees man endowed
with infinite powers of control should he care to exercise
them. More importantly, in the perspective of scien-
tific knowledge it sees man against his true background —
a background of the irresponsible matter and energy of
which he is himself composed, of the long and blind evolu-
tion of which he is himself a product. Humanity thus
appears as a very peculiar phenomenon — a fraction of the
universal world-stuff which, as result of long processes of
change and strife, has been made conscious of itself and
of its relations with the rest of the world-stuff, capable of
desiring, feeling, judging, and planning. It is an experi-

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mcnt of the universe in rational self-consciousness. (So
far as we are yet aware, it is the only such experiment;
but that is a matter of secondary importance.) Any value
which it has apart from its selfish value to itself resides
in this fact.

The apprehension of values depends upon a balancing
of motives and ideas; a standard of values demands con-
ceptual thought. Even the highest animals have only the
barest rudiment of such possibilities. But once man, by
the aid of language, could think abstract thoughts, a new
framework was generated, a framework as important to
mental life as the skeletal framework to bodily life — the
framework of universals and ideals. This is an immediate
by-product of language and logic. It is impossible to
pronounce the simplest judgment — ‘this is true,’ or ‘that
is not true* — without implicitly setting up a category of
abstract truth. Once you can argue whether an action is
right or wrong, you presuppose ar ideal of rightness. You
may not consciously envisage such ideals, but your own or
others’ logic will sooner or later lead you to them. The
humanist sees no other absolute quality in truth or good-
ness than this.

The actual way in which these abstract ideas are applied
as standards of value is subject to change. The ideas
about truth held by a believer in verbal inspiration must
be different from those of one trained in the methods of
philosophy or of mathematical physics. Just as the bodily
skeleton was moulded and improved during the course of
its evolution, so this spiritual framework grows and is
modified.

The different emphasis laid upon this world and the
next, for instance, has produced very different measuring

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

rods for goodness in the minds of the medieval theologian
and the modern social worker. Again, many religious
minds have found acceptance of a fixed creed the highest
good, because they believe it the only avenue to salvation.
To the evolutionist, who knows the variety but incom-
pleteness of life, and the necessity for change, this good
turns to bad. These universals are but frameworks. To
revert to our metaphor, they resemble the archetypal plans
of construction of this or that animal organ which have no
concrete existence (save in the pages of zoological text-
books), but yet underlie and in part determine the con-
struction of every actual organ. The archetypal plan of
vertebrate skeleton could be pinched and pulled to sup-
port a flying or a swimming or a running creature. The
framework of our abstract and universal ideas can be
practically moulded in a not dissimilar adaptive way.

In the course of its evolution, human life comes to gen-
erate new experiences, new ways of living and of expres-
sion, which are concretely of value in themselves ; in this
way new qualities and also new heights of value are at-
tained. Stoicism was the means of giving the world a
new type of character. Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova’ was the ex-
pression of a new way of love between man and woman
which in previous ages had not been possible. The trans-
ference of the sense of supreme sacredness from fear to
love, accomplished by Jesus, led man to wholly new levels
of religious value. Pure knowledge has absolute value:
and in the intellectual comprehension of the world about
us given by Newton, by Darwin, or by the latest discoveries
in astrophysics, science has produced something new and
valuable. Beethoven in his posthumous quartets and
other late works produced something wholly new in the

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SCIENTIFIC HUMANISM

world; it is not new knowledge of the external world but
knowledge of new capabilities of the human spirit — new
experience. In all such cases, of course, others may not
be capable of appreciating the new-found value, may not
wish to employ it. But the value has been created; it is
there, waiting to be used.

One of the functions of humanity in its evolutionary
experiment is thus, it seems, the creating of new experi-
ences of value, in any and every realm, from character to
pure intellect, from religion to art.

As a matter of history, the course of events in this pro-
gressive change of framework and progressive realization
of new value has so far been rather a curious one. At the
risk of over-simplification, I may put it thus. In primi-
tive man, and in many of the uneducated to-day, different
values are not much thought about or analysed, but just
accepted. Each separate activity, as it happens to come
along, is instinctively valued for its immediate satisfaction.
Further, since the value of many later and complex human
experiences cannot be felt by a mind which is not trained
or not set in a certain direction (I do not suppose you
could ever get a Masai warrior to see that there was ‘any-
thing in’ the Vita Nuova, any more than a wholly un-
trained mind could be thrilled by reading the latest
cosmogony by Jeans or Eddington), the experiences re-
garded as valuable are themselves more primitive.

A large part of early man's values must have been con-
cerned with physiological satisfaction, his life a series of
activities only very partially related in thought, his various
mental activities existing in more or less ‘thought-tight*
compartments. But just because he was not too logical,
and because he was endowed with a variety of instinctive

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

impulses, his life, though on a low level, was full and
varied.

Man’s intellectual faculties, hovering protectively over
his naked feelings and desires, have doubtless always done
something to cloak them with the respectability of reason
— or at least of reasons. But in the beginnings of society
this rationalizing power must have been very incomplete
and unco-ordinated. With settled civilization, the reflec-
tive mind had new leisure and new opportunities. The
result was apparent in the various theological and philo-
sophical schemes, aiming at some degree of logic and
completeness, which have characterized the last three or
four thousand years.

It was as if the human spirit, growing more fully con-
scious of itself, its needs and it's defects, its strange isola-
tion in an incomprehensible and often hostile world, felt
the imperative need of some support, some framework of
authority outside the individual and, if possible, outside
the species, some relief from vague fears and speculations
by means of clear-cut explanations.

The support may have been needful; but it was in
danger of becoming a prison. Abstract thought can be so
devastating just because it is general, because of its ap-
parent absoluteness. There is no gainsaying logic. Once
you cease to have the saving grace of humility, and believe
fhat you possess any final or definitive knowledge of the
nature of things, whether off your own bat, or conferred
by external grace of revelation, you are doomed if you
make the appeal to logic. Your premises are bound to be
incomplete; and the inaccuracy, multiplied by the chain
of levers which logic provides from particular to general,
at the last assumes portentous proportions.

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If men really believed the medieval Christian scheme,
they were bound to be intolerant, bound to persecute and
establish inquisitions. If you really believe that kingship
or marriage or the decalogue was divinely ordained, you
cannot help drawing certain practical conclusions which
will in time put you in violent opposition to the humanist
view on such subjects.

The period of human evolution which we may call the
period of the great theological religions was from this
point of view one in which perplexed human beings, in
their struggle with the outer world, with other human
beings, and most of all with the tortuous inconsistencies
and treacheries of the human spirit, found much-needed
help in the fixity of generalized schemes of thought. They
discovered that they could gain support from abstract
ideas such as of reason or justice ; from unattainable but
absolute ideals, as of goodness or truth; from the un-
assailable logic of complete schemes of creation and salva-
tion. The externalizing of the compulsive but changeable
inner voice of impulse and conscience in outer authority and
codes of divine revelation was another method of finding
support, and the psychological trickery involved in this pro-
jection of inner feeling into outer sanction was so simple
and natural to untutored thinking that it passed unnoticed.

But the method had its inevitable defects. Grateful
support could become imperceptibly converted into cramp-
ing rigidity. The inevitable slight pre-eminence given
to this or that quality in the original scheme of thought
could become magnified by logic into an entire one-sided-
ness. The general and abstract could be taken for the
absolute and complete, and so the way barred to novelty
or fresh achievements.

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In the last half-millennium there has been a change.
Thought has not only attacked the rigidity of the old
schemes but has also devoted itself to new creation. The
absoluteness and externality of the old frameworks are
gone. Scientific law, for instance, is no longer regarded as
the transcription of some prodigious code laid up in heaven,
but as the most convenient way in which our human in-
tellect can sum up the controllable aspects of phenomena.

The new attack has at last invaded the citadel itself.
No longer can we set matter against life; or life against
mind; or mind against spirit, as two essentially different
realms.

The time is beginning to ripen in which we can attempt
to recover a greater elasticity of our framework by going
back to the beginning, to the nature of things and the
nature of man as seen in the light of new knowledge, and
by building up our scheme anew. This new humanism,
if we attempt it, must in the first place try to do justice to
the variety of human nature and refrain from giving pre-
eminence to any one aspect — a task which demands a
difficult combination of altruism and tolerance. It must
attempt to do justice to our incompleteness, and to the
constant change in knowledge and outlook which we must
hope for. This demands a sacrifice almost intolerable to
certain minds — the sacrifice of certitude. It must finally
attempt to provide some real and strong framework of
support, and so prevent the exaggerated individualism,
the social disintegration, and the tolerance that turns to
indifferentism, which have characterized other humanistic
periods such as the early Roman Empire or the Renais-
sance.

But humanism, with the aid of the picture given by
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science, can achieve a framework strong enough for sup-
port. In the light of evolution, it can see an unlimited
possibility of human betterment. And it can see that
possibility as* a continuation of the long process of bio-
logical betterment that went before the appearance of man.
If humanism cannot have the fixed certitude of dogma, it
can at least have a certitude of direction and aim. The
altruistic forces of human nature need not be restricted to
isolated acts of doing good. They can harness themselves
for the task, inspiring because of its very size, of slowly
moving mankind along the upward evolutionary path.

The other certitude it can lay claim to is the certitude of
its own values. They cannot be disputed — they are simply
experienced. Anyone who has experienced the illumina-
tion of new knowledge, or the ecstasy of poetry or music,
or the deliberate subordination of self to something greater,
or the self-abandonment of falling in love, or complete
physical well-being, or the intense satisfaction of a difficult
task achieved, or has had a mystical experience, knows
that they are in some way valuable for their own sakes be-
yond ordinary everyday satisfactions, such as being just
moderately fit, earning one’s own living, or filling one’s
belly. We must see to it that our pursuit of these experi-
ences does not conflict with other sides of our nature, or
with other human beings ; here again what is absolute in
its own right is purely relative within the general scheme.
But the values are there and are real, and there is some
general consensus as to their scale of grading. The
difficulty for many minds is that these values are of our
own generating, not in any way endowed with external
authority. But in the religious sphere was it not Jesus who
laid down once and for all that the kingdom of heaven is

267

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

within us ? And if we abandon the idea of external certi-
tude in regard to scientific law, we need not worry about
doing so for our scheme of values.

At the present moment we have no policy of values such
as, at least in theory, the Middle Ages possessed. The
world is but limited in size; yet we permit this or that
incomplete idea to go spreading patchily over its surface,
almost without reference to what else it may make im-
possible. If there is one thing which is obvious, it surely
is that economic aims are not a final end in themselves.
To be prosperous is a prerequisite to innumerable other
activities; but prosperity is not the chief measure by
which we should judge success. The same applies to the
quantitative mania for which American cities have been
famous, but from which no nation is really exempt — the
mania which assumes that what matters is the number of
people in a town irrespective of their qualities or what they
are doing, the amount of money spent on a building irre-
spective of its beauty, and so on.

Without any general scheme of values, we take a whole
series of human needs and aims in turn, pretend that each
is somehow absolute, try to push it to its logical conclusion,
and then let them all fight it out. In the resultant chaos,
of course, many other subtler values languish.

Let us take population. The value of human life be-
comes so absolute that it is murder to put away a deformed
mpnster at birth, and criminal to suggest euthanasia; and
we push on with our reduction of infant mortality until we
save an excess of cripples and defectives from which to
breed. The enhanced control that is in our hands and the
fact that much of the world is actually filling up are at last
giving us pause. The Indian mortality rate could doubt-

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SCIENTIFIC HUMANISM

less be reduced by half — but what would you do with the
increased population ? Even if you bring huge areas of
arid Indian land under irrigation and cultivation, it is only
a matter of a generation or so before the new vacant space
will be overrun by new population on the same low level
of prosperity, health, and education as the old. Have you
done any good by causing more babies to live and so
creating greater population-pressure, or by opening up
new land to be filled at once by the human flood ? Might
it not have been better to have left the death side of nature’s
population-control to itself until we had some future policy
for dealing simultaneously with birth? or to have kept
some open spaces in reserve until there was some better
reason for filling them? At the moment, most people
do not even put such questions, much less try to answer
them.

In England the tiny size of the country has at last forced
us to ask ourselves questions of this kind. Here again,
we have let each partial aim be carried out without refer-
ence to a general policy and are suddenly awaking to the
fact that they are all cutting each other’s throats. At last
we have begun to ask what we want to live for, and to
realize that the intangible values must be planned and
worked for as much as the tangible ones, that there are
people to whom solitude and wild nature provide some of
the highest values in their lives, as there are others to
whom social intercourse is the greatest pleasure.

Humanism thus would try to plan its limited physical
environment so that within it different values are balanced
and do not conflict too. disastrously. This is a fairly ob-
vious step to take. But a subtler reaction of the humanist
point of view will be its influence upon our equally limited

269

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

individual lives. With the decay of rigid codes, rigid
schemes of valuation, rigid ideas of externally imposed
law, we need be much less the victims of consistency.

There is value in logical thought ; so there is in mystical
experience. Because for the moment we cannot intellectu-
ally grasp why the mystical experience is of value, we need
not reject it, any more than we need reject the value of
logical thought because it does not give the peace or sense
of completion produced by the mystical experience.

Self-sacrifice and asceticism can be experienced as of
the utmost value; so can self-expression or the fullest
satisfaction of bodily needs. It is very difficult, however,
for some people to think that they or anyone else can be
genuine in deliberately practising what are loosely called
self-denial and self-indulgence at different times. Yet so
long as the impulse to either is genuine, both can be of
value, and it is often only the demon of consistency which
prevents us from achieving the needed genuineness of im-
pulse. Both purge the soul and nourish it, though in
different ways, and we have to accept that as fact instead
of trying to explain it away by logic. Even should we
eventually choose one way or one activity as having
supreme value for us, we must not deny the right of others
to choose differently. And also we are not likely to prac-
tise our choice well unless we have had experience of other
activities. It is no coincidence that many saints, like
Augustine or Francis, began by tasting the variety of
life’s ordinary joys to the full.

Do not let it be supposed that I am preaching hedon-
ism, even a spiritualized hedonism. Hedonism, like utili-
tarianism, is another of those paper schemes, beautifully
logical, that just are not true. The humanist, looking into

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human nature, must acknowledge that effort is often its
own reward, that pain may be essential to development,,
that limitation is frequently a prerequisite to achievement.
He finds the desire for sacrifice and self-mortification just
as natural and almost as widespread as the desire for
achievement and self-assertion — and sees that the one
tendency is just as dangerous and unpleasant as the other
if indulged in the wrong way.

And he sees, looking beyond man by the light of science,
that all these qualities have their counterpart in biological
evolution, and all seem necessary for the advancement of
the evolutionary experiment. Sacrifice and self-assertion
are both biological necessities in their place and time;
without effort there could be no survival, without pain no
surmounting of harm, without limitation of possibility no
realization of actual biological success.

The difference between human and biological affairs is
that man, through his new powers of mind, has reached a
new stage. From the purely biological standpoint, the
main criteria are survival and reproduction. Man has
entered a realm where things and experiences can have a
supreme value in themselves even without subserving any
purely biological needs. The love immortalized in the
‘Vita Nuova’ has been spiritualized away from its original
connection with reproduction. A life devoted to pure
music or pure mathematics has no counterpart whatever
among lower organisms. Up till now, most of the ener-
gies of the human race have been devoted to the biological
needs of individual and racial survival. But now we are
at least able to envisage a future in which the control of
environment provided by science will be so effective that
only a small fraction of human energy need be devoted to

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

merely biological ends. The rest will be free to satisfy
itself as it wishes. One of the problems of the past has
been to keep the sense of values unimpaired by disease,
misery, and grinding poverty. A serious problem of the
future will be how to keep values unimpaired by super-
abundance of leisure.

At the moment there are vast possibilities of values run-
ning to waste because they are not harnessed, or because
they are not even realized. The number of subtle and
individual minds that find themselves unable to join whole-
heartedly in any corporate organization is increasing; they
find themselves over-individualized, incapable of experi-
encing many of the values which come from losing self.
The organizations in which the individual can lose him-
self and taste self-sacrifice and corporate enhancement,
are for the most part blatantly irrational like political
parties, or committed to out-of-date or one-sided ideas
like most of the churches; or, like public schools, they
encourage crude and juvenile loyalties; or, as in the team-
work of sport, they satisfy only a limited part of human
nature.

One real task for humanism as I see it is to develop or-
ganizations which shall satisfy the need for corporate
action and loyalty — the desire we all have to feel of use —
and shall provide an outlet for self-sacrifice as well as for
intellectual aspirations. Mr Wells once sketched out such
an organization in his ‘New Samurai.' The success they
might have is foreshadowed by the success already attend-
ing such imperfect adumbrations of the idea as the
Boy Scouts or the various Youth Movements in Central
Europe. I do not think it would be impossible to build up
a scheme of the sort in connection with education,, though

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SCIENTIFIC HUMANISM

at present most people not already committed to organiza-
tions are too much ashamed of showing enthusiasm in un-
fashionable ways to begin planning along the proper lines
and on the proper scale.

The fact is that no community has ever yet set itself
seriously to the task of scientific humanism. No nation
has really attempted to think out what are the valuable
things in life and the relations between them, or to work
out the best means of realizing these values in fullest in-
tensity and proper relative dosage. A few individual
thinkers have tried their hands, but until society as a whole
gets busy with the problem, individual attempts will have
little effect.

Is it possible to plan a body which shall engender en-
thusiasm and canalize devotion after the fashion of a young
religious order, but which shall not fall into the dangers
of religious dogmatism and shall not by defects in its or-
ganization slip into the conservatism or worldliness which
is the usual fate of so many orders ?

Is it possible to organize a body of opinion which shall
combine the enthusiasm of a political party with the sus-
pension of judgment of the scientific investigator? Is it
possible during education to give the average boy and girl
such a taste for various values — beauty in art, say, or
beauty in nature — that they will cherish them throughout
life ? At present we for the most part stuff them with facts
so as quite to ruin their taste for knowledge, and we leave
other values to look after themselves. It is the custom to
say that modern psychology delights in revealing the most
unsavoury motives to our most respectable actions. It
was Freud himself, however, who said that if the average
man is in some ways much more immoral than he suspects,
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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

he is in others much more moral. There is, in fact, a
reserve of the angelic in ordinary people which is unused
and even unsuspected because it does not fit in with every-
day ideas, because we most of us are subconsciously rather
apologetic about such impractical and inconvenient ideal-
isms. Is there a way of tapping this reserve of moral
power without letting it loose in the form of irrational
prejudice or wild fanaticism, moral, religious, or patriotic ?
On these and hundreds of similar questions we are blankly
ignorant. We build laboratories to test out how we can
harness and concentrate electrical and chemical and me-
chanical forces; but the corresponding problem of har-
nessing and intensifying the latent powers and activities
of human nature we have scarcely even begun to envisage.

Scientific humanism is a protest against supernatural-
ism: the human spirit, now in its individual, now in its
corporate aspects, is the source of all values and the highest
reality we know. It is a protest against one-sidedness and
fixity: the human spirit has many sides and cannot be
ruled by any single rule; nor can it be restrained from
making new discoveries in the adventure of its evolution.
It insists that the same scientific procedure can be applied
to human life as has been applied with such success to
lifeless matter and to animals and plants — scientific sur-
vey, study, and analysis, followed by increasing practical
control. It insists oh human values as the norms for our
aims, but insists equally that they cannot adjust themselves
in right perspective and emphasis except as part of the
picture of the world provided by science. It realizes that
human desires and aspirations are the motive power of
life, but insists that no long-range or comprehensive aim
of humanity can ever be realized except with the aid of

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SCIENTIFIC HUMANISM

the pedestrian and dispassionate methods, the systematic
planning, the experimental testing which can be provided
by science alone.

At the moment a particular task of scientific humanism
is to clarify its own ideas as to the limitations of the various
activities of the human mind. To take but three, science,
religion, and art. Science is a way of collecting and hand-
ling experience of the controllable aspects of phenomena.
Religion is a way of experiencing the impact of the outer
universe on the personality as a whole; the universe and
human personality being what they are, this way of experi-
ence will always involve some feeling of sacredness. Art
is a way of expressing some felt experience in communic-
able form; and in a manner which always involves that
most difficult of things to define, the aesthetic emotion.
Each selects and correlates in its own special way out of
the common flux of experience. Each tells you something
about reality — science more about the external aspects of
it which can be controlled either in thought or practice;
religion more about the kingdom of heaven that is within
us; art about the fusion of inner and outer in individual
experiences of value in themselves. Each is limited in its
scope and its bearings, but each can be universally applied.,

In my term ‘scientific humanism’ I have chosen to em-
phasize science as against all the other human activities for
a simple reason — that at the moment science is in danger
of setting itself up as an external code or framework as did
revealed religion in the past; and only by putting it in its
rightful place in the humanist scheme shall we avoid this
dangerous dualism. But if science must beware of trying
to become a dictator, the other human activities must be-
ware of the jealousy which would try to banish the upstart

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

from their affairs. The only significance we can see attach-
ing to man’s place in nature is that he is willy-nilly engaged
in a gigantic evolutionary experiment by which life may at-
tain to new levels of achievement and experience. Without
the impersonal guidance and the efficient control provided
by science, civilization will either stagnate or collapse, and
human nature cannot make progress toward realizing its
possible evolutionary destiny.

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RELIGION AS AN OBJECTIVE
PROBLEM

R eligion, like any other subject, can be treated as an ob-
jective problem, and studied by the method of science.
The first step is to make a list of the ideas and practices
associated with different religions — gods and demons, sac-
rifice, prayer, belief in a future life, tabus and moral rules
in this life. This, however, is but a first step. It is like
making a collection of animals and plants, or a catalogue
of minerals or other substances, with their properties and
uses. Science always begins in this way, but it cannot stop
at this level : it inevitably seeks to penetrate deeper and to
make an analysis.

This analysis may take two directions. It may seek for
a further understanding of religion as it now exists, or it
may adopt the historical method and search for an explan-
ation of the present in the past.

With regard to the historical approach, it is clear that
religion, like other social activities, evolves. Further, its
evolution is determined by two main kinds of factors. One
is its own emotional and intellectual momentum, its inner
logic: the other is the influence of the material and social
conditions of the period. As an example of the first, take
the tendency from polytheism towards monotheism :
granted the theistic premise, this tendency seems almost
inevitably to declare itself in the course of time. As ex-
amples of the second, we have the fact of propitiatory sacri-
fice related to helplessness in face of external nature.

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

The comparative evolutionary study of religion brings
out two or three main points. For instance, we have the
original prevalence of magical ideas, and their application
first to the practical activities of communal existence such
as food-getting and war, and only later to the problems of
personal salvation : and these in their turn come gradually
to be dominated more by moral ideas and less by magic.
In the sphere of theology we have the early prevalence of
rambling myth, and its gradual crystallization into a fully
rationalized system. In this domain too we see an inter-
esting evolution from an early stage in which certain ob-
jects, acts, and persons are supposed to be imbued with an
impersonal sacred influence or mana , and a later stage at
which this sacred influence is pushed back a stage and
attributed to supernatural beings behind objects.

Finally, there is the important fact that religious beliefs
and practices have a very strong time-lag — a high degree
of hysteresis, if you prefer a physical metaphor.

We next have to ask ourselves what is the result of our
other type of analysis of the nature of religion. In the
most general terms, it is that religion is the product of a
certain type of interaction between man and his environ-
ment. It always involves an emotional component — the
sense of sacredness. It always involves a more than in-
tellectual belief — a sense of compulsive rightness. It is
always concerned with human destiny, and with a way of
life. It always brings the human being into some sort of
felt relation with powers or agencies outside his personal
self. It always involves some sort of escape from inner
conflict. These different components may be very un-
equally developed, but they are always present.

Pushing the analysis a stage further, religion is seen as
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RELIGION AS AN OBJECTIVE PROBLEM

an attempt to come to terms with the irrational forces that
affect man — some cosmic, some social, some personal.
These terms may be terms of capitulation or of victory, of
compromise or of escape. Here once more there is
immense variety.

A very important further point is this — that there is no
single function of religion. We may class religious func-
tions by their external points of reference or by their in-
ternal origins. Externally, the first religious function is
to place man in a satisfactory emotional relation with his
non-human environment, regarded as outer destiny or
fate. The second is to do the same for his social environ-
ment; the third, to do the same for his personal actions.

Looked at from the point of view of internal origin,
the matter is much more complicated. One very import-
ant religious function is that of rationalization — giving
coherent explanations in rational terms for acts and feel-
ings which arise from instinctive and therefore irrational
sources. Another is that which we have already men-
tioned, the desire for unity. These two between them
provide the theological side of religions.

More fundamental — since they provide the raw mate-
rials on which the rationalizing and unifying urges act —
are the purely emotional components. These fall under
two main heads — the functions arising from conflict or
reaction between the self and the outer world, and those
arising from conflict or reaction between parts of the self.

Among the former we may mention the need to escape
from frustration and limitations; and the need for en-
hancement of the actual, the gilding of the imperfect. At
length we come to relations between parts of the self,
which are the most potent of all in generating religious

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

reactions. Here we must take account of several basic
facts of human mind. First there is the inevitability of
conflict — a necessary consequence of man's mental make-
up. Then there is the illimitable nature of desire and
aspiration. Analogous to this last, but in the intellectual
instead of the emotional sphere, is man's concept-forming
activity, which inevitably gives rise to abstract terms like
justice, truth, and beauty. These, being abstract, are
empty; but illimitable desire perennially fills them with
its imaginations. Then there is the fact of childhood re-
pression, with its consequences, only now beginning to be
realized by the world, of a burden of (often unconscious)
guilt. Closely linked with this is the obsession of certi-
tude. The mechanism of repression is an all-or-none
mechanism : and the conscious accompaniment of such a
mechanism is a subjective sense of certitude.

Another very important function is to provide some-
thing which is felt as eternal and unchanging (even though
in reality it may merely be long-range and slow-changing)
over against the limitations and changes of ordinary
existence.

But I must not spend too much time on mere analysis.
The next question is whether the scientific approach can
throw any light on the present crisis in religion and its
possible future solution.

The particular situation that confronts the religion of
western civilization is this. The concept of God has
reached the limits of its usefulness: it cannot evolve fur-
ther. Supernatural powers were created by man to carry
the burden of religion. From diffuse magic mana to per-
sonal spirits; from spirits to gods; from gods to God —
so crudely speaking, the evolution has gone. The par-

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ticular phase of that evolution which concerns us is that of
gods. In one period of our western civilization the gods
were necessary fictions, useful hypotheses by which to live.

But the gods are only necessary or useful in a certain
phase of evolution. For gods to be of value to man, three
things are necessary. The disasters of the outer world
must still be sufficiently uncomprehended and uncon-
trolled to be mysteriously alarming. Or else the beastli-
ness and hopelessness of common life must be such as to
preclude any pinning of faith to the improvement in this
world: then God can, and social life cannot, provide the
necessary escape-mechanism. The belief in magical power
must still be current, even if it be in a refined or sublim-
ated form. And the analytic exploration of his own mind
by man must not be so advanced that he can no longer
project and personify the unconscious forces of his Super-
ego and his Id as beings external to himself.

The advance of natural science, logic, and psychology
has brought us to a stage at which God is no longer a
useful hypothesis. Natural science has pushed God into
an ever greater remoteness, until his function as ruler and
dictator disappears and he becomes a mere first cause or
vague general principle. The realization that magic is a
false principle, and that control is to be achieved by
science and its application, has removed the meaning
from sacrificial ritual and petitionary prayer. The ana-
lysis of the human mind, with the discovery of its powers
of projection and wish-fulfilment, its hidden subconscious-
ness and unrealized repressions, makes it unnecessary to
believe that conversion and the like are due to any external
spiritual power and unscientific to ascribe inner certitude
to guidance by God.

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

And theological logic, inevitably tending to unify and
to universalize its ideas of the Divine, has resulted in a
monotheism which is self-contradictory and incompre-
hensible, and in some respects of less practical value than
the polytheism which it replaced.

If you grant theism of any sort, the logical outcome is
monotheism. But why theism at all ? Why a belief in
supernatural beings who stand in some relation to human
destiny and human aspirations ? Theistic belief depends
on man’s projection of his own ideas and feelings into
nature: it is a personification of non-personal pheno-
mena. Personification is God’s major premise. But it is
a mere assumption, and one which, while serviceable
enough in earlier times, is now seen not only to be un-
warranted, but to raise more difficulties than it solves.
Religion, to continue as an element of first-rate import-
ance in the life of the community, must drop the idea of
God or at least relegate it to a subordinate position, as
has happened to the magical element in the past. God,
equally with gods, angels, demons, spirits, and other small
spiritual fry, is a human product, arising inevitably from a
certain kind of ignorance and a certain degree of helpless-
ness with regard to man’s external environment.

With the substitution of knowledge for ignorance in
his field, and the growth of control, both actually achieved
and realized by thought as possible, God is simply fading
away, as the Devil has faded before him, and the pantheons
of the ancient world, and the nymphs and the local spirits.

Peor and Baalim

Forsake their temples dim . . .

Milton wrote of the fading of all the pagan gods; and

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RELIGION AS AN OBJECTIVE PROBLEM

Milton’s God too is joining them in limbo. s God has
become more remote and more incomprehensible, and,
most important of all, of less practical use to men and
women who want guidance and consolation in living
their lives. A faint trace of God, half metaphysical
and half magic, still broods over our world, like the
smile of a cosmic Cheshire Cat. But the growth of
psychological knowledge will rub even that from the
universe.

However — and this is vital — the fading of God does
not mean the end of religion. God’s disappearance is in
the strictest sense of the word a theological process : and
while theologies change, the religious impulses which
gave them birth persist.

The disappearance of God means a recasting of religion,
and a recasting of a fundamental sort. It means the
shouldering by man of ultimate responsibilities which he
had previously pushed off on to God.

What are these responsibilities which man must now
assume? First, responsibility for carrying on in face of
the world’s mystery and his own ignorance. In previous
ages that burden was shifted on to divine inscrutability:
‘God moves in a mysterious way.’ . . . Now we lay it to the
account of our own ignorance, and face the possibility that
ignorance of ultimates may, through the limitations of our
nature, be permanent.

Next, responsibility for the long-range control of des-
tiny. That we can no longer shift on to God the Ruler.
Much that theistic religion left to divine guidance remains
out of our hands : but our knowledge gives us power of
controlling our fate and that of the planet we inhabit,
within wide limits. In a phrase, we are the trustees of the

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evolutionary process and, like all trustees, responsible for
our trust.

Thirdly and most urgently, responsibility for the im-
mediate health and happiness of the species, for the en-
hancement of life on this earth, now and in the immediate
future. Poverty, slavery, ill-health, social misery, demo-
cracy, kingship, this or that economic or political system
— they do not inhere inevitably ih a divinely appointed
order of things: they are phenomena to be understood
and controlled in accordance with our desire, just as much
as the phenomena of chemistry or electricity.

Finally, there is the question of the immediate future of
religion. Can science make any prophecy or offer any
guidance in regard to this ? I think that within limits, it
can. In the first place, by analysing the reasons for the
breakdown of the traditional supernatural religious sys-
tems of the West, it can point out that, unless the trend of
history is reversed, the breakdown is an irremediable one.
For it is due to the increase of our knowledge and control,
the decrease of our ignorance and fear, in relation to man’s
external environment — machinery, crop-production, phy-
sical and chemical invention, floods, disease-germs — and
unless science and technology disappear in a new Dark
Age, this will persist.

The collapse of supernaturalist theology has been ac-
companied by the collapse, first of supernatural moral
sanctions, and then of any absolute basis for morals. This
too must be regarded as a process which, in the event of
the continuance of civilization, is irreversible.

We can, however, go further. We have seen that the
breakdown of traditional religion has been brought about
by the growth of man’s knowledge and control over his

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RELIGION AS AN OBJECTIVE PROBLEM

environment. But biologists distinguish between the ex-
ternal and the internal environment. Our blood provides
our tissues with an internal environment regulated to a
nicety both as regards its temperature and its chemical
constitution, whereas the blood of a sea-urchin affords ic
such constancy. The organization of an ants* nest pro-
vides for the species an internal environment of a social
nature. And in contrast with the rapid increase of man’s
knowledge of and control over his external environment,
there has been little or no corresponding progress as re-
gards the internal environment of his species. This is
equally true in regard to the structure of society which
provides the social environment for the individual and the
race, and for the Complex of feelings and ideas which pro-
vide the psychological environment in which the personal
life of the individual is bathed.

These two aspects of man’s internal environment of
course interact and at points indeed unite — witness the
field of social psychology : but for the most part they can
be best considered from two very different angles — on the
one side from the angle of economics, politics, law and
sociology, on the other from the angle of psychological
science. Not only have we as yet no adequate scientific
knowledge or control over these phenomena, but our
absence of control is causing widespread bewilderment.
The common man to-day is distressed not only over his
own sufferings, but at the spectacle of the helplessness of
those in responsible positions in face of the maladjust-
ments of the world’s economic and political machinery.

In this field the fear of the uncomprehended, banished
elsewhere, has once more entered human life. The fear is
all the more deadly because the forces feared are of man’s

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own making. No longer can we blame the gods. The
modern Prometheus has chained himself to the rock, and
himself fostered the vulture which now gnaws his vitals : his
last satisfaction, of defying the Olympian tyrant, is gone.

The distress and the bewilderment are experienced as
yet mainly in the more tangible realm of social and econ-
omic organization: the mental stresses and distortions
arising from the social maladjustment remain for the time
being in the background of public consciousness.

With the aid of our analysis of the nature and functions
of religion, we can accordingly make certain definite asser-
tions as to its future. The prophecy of science about the
future of religion is that the religious impulse will become
progressively more concerned with the organization of
society — which, in the immediate future, will mean the
organization of society on the basis of the nation or the
regional group of nations.

The process, of course, has already begun. Many
observers have commented on the religious elements in
Russian communism — the fanaticism, the insistence on
orthodoxy, the violent ‘theological’ disputes, the ‘wor-
ship’ of Lenin, the spirit of self-dedication, the persecu-
tions, the common enthusiasm, the puritan element, the
mass-emotions, the censorship. A very similar set of
events is to be seen in Nazi Germany. In that country, of
especial interest to the scientist and the student of com-
parative religion are such phenomena as the falsification of
history and anthropological theory in the interest of a
theory of the State and of the Germanic race which serves
as the necessary ‘theological’ rationalization of the emo-
tions underlying the Nazi movement, and the dragooning
of the Protestant churches to fit them into the Nazi scheme

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RELIGION AS AN OBJECTIVE PROBLEM

of things. The modern persecution of the Jews, which
has its real basis in economic and social dislike, is justified
on the basis of this new religiously-felt Germanism, just
as the medieval persecution of the Jews, which equally
sprang from economic and social dislike, was justified cn
the basis of Christianity.

These are the first gropings of the human mind after a
social embodiment of the religious impulse. They are as
crude and in some respects as nasty as its first gropings,
millennia previously, after a theistic embodiment of re-
ligion. The beast-headed gods and goddesses of those
earlier times, the human sacrifice, the loss of self-criticism
in the flood of emotional certitude, the sinister power of a
privileged hierarchy, the justification of self, and the vili-
fication of critics and the violence toward opponents —
these and other primitive phenomena of early God-religion
have their counterparts in to-day’s dawn of social religion.
And the general unrest and the widespread preoccupation
with emotionally-based group movements such as Fascism
and Communism, is in many ways comparable with the
religious unrest that swept the Mediterranean world in
the centuries just before and after the beginning of the
Christian Era.

To achieve some real understanding and control of the
forces and processes operating in human societies is the
next great task for science; and the applications of scien-
tific discovery in this field will have as their goal what we
may call the Socialized State. The religious impulse,
itself one of the social forces to be more fully compre-
hended and controlled, will increasingly find its outlet in
the promotion of the ideals of the Socialized State.

Exactly how all this will happen no one can say —
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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

whether the religious impulse will again crystallize into a
definite religious system with its own organization, or will
find its outlets within the bounds of other organizations,
as it does for instance in the Communist party in Russia.
We can, however, on the basis of the past history of
religion, make a further prophecy. We can be reason-
ably sure that the inner momentum of logic and moral
feelings, combined with the outer momentum derived
from increasing comprehension and control, will lead
to an improvement in the expression of this socialized
religion comparable to the progress of theistic religion
from its crude beginnings toward developed monotheism.

Accordingly, we can prophesy that in the long run
the nationalistic element in socialized religion will be
subordinated or adjusted to the internationalist: that the
persecution of minorities will give place td toleration ; that
the subtler intellectual and moral virtues will find a place
and will gradually oust the cruder from their present pre-
eminence in the religiously-conceived social organism.

We can also assert with fair assurance that this process
of improvement will be a slow one, and accompanied by
much violence and suffering.

Finally, we can make the prophecy that part of this
process will come about through interaction between two
expressions of the religious spirit — one which strives to
identify itself with the Socialized State, the other which
reacts against the limitations thus imposed and strives to
assert and uphold values that are felt to be more perma-
nent and more universal. The cruder and more violent is
the socialized religion, the more will it encourage such
reactions. Already in Nazi Germany such a reaction has
taken place among certain elements of the Protestant

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RELIGION AS AN OBJECTIVE PROBLEM

churches, who feel that their principles embody some-
thing higher, more lasting, and more general than any-
thing, however intense, which is at the basis of a nation-
alist and racialist conception of social aims.

fc This is the one domain in which traditional religion, with
its universalist monotheism, will in the near future have
a real advantage over socialized religion, which for some
time will inevitably be bound up with nationalist states.

It is probable, however, that a universalist Humanism
(and probably Communism too) will soon become a strong
rival of the old theistic systems in this field. It is also
probable that with the growth of intolerant socialized feel-
ing, both in Communistic and Fascist societies, the pion-
eers of such a Humanism will be those most exposed to
religious persecution, but also those who will be doing
most for their form of socialized religion and for religious
progress in general.

One final prophecy, and I have done. It seems evident
that as the religious impulse comes to create these new
outlets or expressions, whether by way of the Socialized
State or by way of Humanism, it will be increasingly con-
fronted by psychological problems — as indeed will the
Socialized State itself. Men will realize that economic
and social planning will not solve their problems so long
as ignorance and absence of control obtain in regard to
their own minds. Psychological science will then come
into its own, with social psychology as its dominant
branch. And this will mean a new understanding of
religious phenomena, and new possibilities of integrating
them with the life of the community.

To sum up, I would say first that the so-called ‘conflict
between science and religion' has been a conflict between

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

one aspect of science and one aspect of religion. These
aspects have both been concerned with man’s relation to his
external environment. The systems of religion which are
in danger of collapse grew out of man’s ignorance and help-
lessness in face of external nature ; the aspect of science
which is endangering those religious systems is that which
has provided knowledge and control in this same domain.

In the near future, the religious impulse will find its
main outlet in relation to the internal environment of the
human species — social, economic, and psychological — for
it is the forces of this internal environment that are now
causing distress and bewilderment and are being felt as
Destiny to be propitiated or otherwise manipulated.
Meanwhile science will find its main scope for new en-
deavour in this same field, since it is here that our ignor-
ance and our lack of control are now most glaring.

There will again be a race between the effects of
ignorance and those of knowledge ; but with several new
features. For one thing, the growth of science in the new
field will this time not lag by many centuries behind that
of the new modes of religious expression ; and for another,
the facts concerning the religious impulse and its expres-
sion will themselves fall within the scope of the new scien-
tific drive. The probable result will be that in the Social-
ized State the relation between religion and science will
gradually cease to be one of conflict and will become one
of co-operation. Science will be called on to advise what
expressions of the religious impulse are intellectually per-
missible and socially desirable, if that impulse is to be
properly integrated with other human activities and har-
nessed to take its share in pulling the chariot of man’s
destiny along the path of progress.

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LIFE CAN BE WORTH LIVING

1 believe that life can be worth living. I believe this in
spite of pain, squalor, cruelty, unhappiness, and death.
I do not believe that it is necessarily worth living, but only
that for most people it can be.

I also believe that man, as individual, as group, and
collectively as mankind, can achieve a satisfying purpose
in existence. I believe this in spite of frustration, aimless-
ness, frivolity, boredom, sloth, and failure. Again I do
not believe that a purpose inevitably inheres in the uni-
verse Or in our existence, or that mankind is bound to
achieve a satisfying purpose, but only that such a purpose
can be found.

I believe that there exists a scale or hierarchy of values,
ranging from simple physical comforts up to the highest
satisfactions of love, aesthetic enjoyment, intellect, creative
achievement, virtue. I do not believe that these are ab-
solute, or transcendental in the sense of being vouchsafed
by some external power or divinity ; they are the product
of human nature interacting with the outer world. Nor
do I suppose that we can grade every valuable experience
into an accepted order, any more than I can say whether
a beetle is a higher organism than a cuttlefish or a herring.
But just as it can unhesitatingly be stated that there are
general grades of biological organization, and that a beetle
is a higher organism than a sponge, or a human being than
a frog, so I can assert, with the general consensus of civil-

291

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

ized human beings, that there is a higher value in Dante’s
Divina Commedia than in a popular hymn, in the scientific
activity of Newton or Darwin than in solving a crossword
puzzle, in the fulness of love than in sexual gratification,
in selfless than in purely self-regarding activities — although
each apd all can have their value of a sort.

I do not believe that there is any absolute of truth,
beauty, morality, or virtue, whether emanating from an
external power or imposed by an internal standard. But
this does not drive me to the curious conclusion, fashion-
able in certain quarters, that truth and beauty and good-
ness do not exist, or that there is no force or value in them.

I believe that there are a number of questions that it is
no use our asking, because they can never be answered.
Nothing but waste, worry, or unhappiness is caused by
trying to solve insoluble problems. Yet some people seem
determined to try. I recall the story of the philosopher
and the theologian. The two were engaged in disputation
and the theologian used the old quip about a philosopher
being like a blind man, in a dark room, looking for a
black cat — which wasn’t there. ‘That may be,’ said the
philosopher; ‘but a theologian would have found it.’

Even in material matters of science we must learn to
ask the right questions. It seemed an obvious question to
ask how animals inherit the result of their parents’ experi-
ence, and enormous amounts of time and energy have been
speht on trying to give an answer to it. It is, however, no
good asking the question, for the simple reason that no
such inheritance of acquired characters exists. The chem-
ists of the eighteenth century, because they asked them-
selves the question, ‘What substance is involved in the
process of burning?’ became involved in the mazes. of the

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LIFE CAN BE WORTH LIVING

phlogiston theory : they had to ask 4 what sort of process
is burning?' before they could see that it did not involve
a special substance but was merely a particular case of
chemical combination.

When we come to what are usually referred to as funda-
mentals, the difficulty of not asking the wrong kind of
question is much increased. Among most African tribes,
if a person dies, the only question asked is, 4 Who caused
his death, and by what form of magic ?’ ; the idea of death
from natural causes is unknown. Indeed, the life of the
less-civilized half of mankind is largely based on trying
to find an answer to a wrong question: 4 What magical
forces or powers are responsible for good or bad fortune,
and how can they be circumvented or propitiated?*

I do not believe in the existence of a god or gods. The
conception of divinity seems to me, though built up out
of a number of real elements of experience, to be a false
one, based on the quite unjustifiable postulate that there
must be some more or less personal power in control of
the world. We are confronted with forces beyond our
control, with incomprehensible disasters, with death, and
also with ecstasy, with a mystical sense of union with some-
thing greater than our ordinary selves, with sudden con-
version to a new way of life, with the burden of guilt and
sin. In theistic religions all these elements of actual ex-
perience have been woven into a unified body of belief and
practice in relation to the fundamental postulate of the
existence of a god or gods.

I believe this fundamental postulate to be nothing more
than the result of asking a wrong question: 4 Who or
what rules the universe?’ So far as we can see, it rules
itself, and indeed the whole analogy with a country and

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THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

its ruler is false. Even if a god does exist behind or above
the universe as we experience it, we can have no know-
ledge of such a power; the actual gods of historical reli-
gions are only the personifications of impersonal facts of
nature and of facts of our inner mental life.

Similarly with immortality. With our present faculties
we have no means of giving a categorical answer to the
question whether we survive death, much less the question
of what any such life after death will be like. That being
so, it is a waste of time and energy to devote ourselves to
the problem of achieving salvation in the life to come.
However, just as the idea of god is built out of bricks of
real experience, so too is the idea of salvation. If we trans-
late salvation into terms of this world, we find that it means
achieving harmony between different parts of our nature,
including its subconscious depths and its rarely touched
heights, and also achieving some satisfactory adjustment
between ourselves and the outer world, including not only
the world of nature but the social world of man. I believe
it to be possible to ‘achieve salvation' in this sense, and
right to aim at doing so, just as I believe it possible and
valuable to achieve a sense of union with something bigger
than our ordinary selves, even if that something be not a
god but an extension of our narrow core to include in a
single grasp ranges of outer experience and inner nature
on which we do not ordinarily draw.

But if God and immortality be repudiated, what is left?
That is the question usually thrown at the atheist's head.
The orthodox believer likes to think that nothing is left.
That, however, is because he has only been accustomed to
think in terms of his orthodoxy.

In point of fact, a great deal is left.

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LIFE CAN BE WORTH LIVING

That is immediately obvious from the fact that many
men and women have led active, or self-sacrificing, or
noble, or devoted lives without any belief in God or im-
mortality. Buddhism in its uncorrupted form has no such
belief; nor did the great nineteenth-century agnostics;
nor do the orthodox Russian Communists; nor did the
Stoics. Of course, the unbelievers have often been guilty
of selfish or wicked actions; but so have the believers.
And in any case that is not the fundamental point. The
point is that without these beliefs men and women may
yet possess the mainspring of full and purposive living,
and just as strong a sense that existence can be worth while
as is possible to the most devout believers.

I would say that this is much more readily possible to-
day than in any previous age. The reason lies in the ad-
vances of science.

No longer are we forced to accept the external cata-
strophes and miseries of existence as inevitable or mys-
terious; no longer are we obliged to live in a world
without history, where change is only meaningless. Our
ancestors saw an epidemic as an act of divine punishment;
to us it is a challenge to be overcome, since we know its
causes and that it can be controlled or prevented. The
understanding of infectious disease is entirely due to scien-
tific advance. So, to take a very recent happening, is our
understanding of the basis of nutrition, which holds out
new possibilities of health and energy to the human race.
So is our understanding of earthquakes and storms ; if we
cannot control them, we at least do not have to fear them
as evidence of God's anger.

Some, at least, of our internal miseries can be lightened
in the same way. Through knowledge derived from psy-

295

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

chology children can be prevented from growing up with
an abnormal sense of guilt and so making life a burden
both to themselves and to those with whom they come into
contact. We are beginning to understand the psycho-
logical roots of irrational fear and cruelty ; some day we
shall be able to make the world a brighter place by pre-
venting their appearance.

The ancients had no history worth mentioning. Hu-
man existence in the present was regarded as a degrada-
tion from that of the original Golden Age. Down even to
the nineteenth century what was known of human history
was regarded by the nations of the West as an essentially
meaningless series of episodes sandwiched into the brief
space between the Creation and the Fall, a few thousand
years ago, and the Second Coming and Last Judgment,
which might be on us at any moment and in any case could
not be pushed back for more than a few thousand years
into the future. In this perspective a millennium was
almost an eternity. With such an outlook no wonder life
seemed, to the great mass of humanity, ‘nasty, brutish,
and short,* its miseries and shortcomings merely bewilder-
ing unless illuminated by the illusory light of religion.

To-day human history merges back into prehistory,
and prehistory again into biological evolution. Our time-
scale is profoundly altered. A thousand years is a short
time for prehistory, which thinks in terms of hundreds of
thousands of years, and an insignificant time for evolution,
which deals in ten-million-year periods. The future is
extended equally with the past; if it took over a thousand
million years for primeval life to generate man, man and
his descendants have at least an equal allowance of time
before them for further evolution.

296

LIFE CAN BE WORTH LIVING

Most of all, the new history has been a basis of hope.
Biological evolution has been appallingly slow and ap-
pallingly wasteful. It has been cruel; it has generated
the parasites and the pests as well as the more agreeable
types. It has led life up innumerable blind alleys. But
in spite of this it has achieved progress. In a few lines,
whose number has steadily diminished with time, it has
avoided the cul-de-sac of mere specialization and arrived
at a new level of organization, more harmonious and more
efficient, from which it could again launch out toward
greater control, greater knowledge, and greater independ-
ence. Progress is, if you will, all-round specialization.
Finally, but one line was left which was able to achieve
further progress ; all the others had led up blind alleys. This
was the line leading to the evolution of the human brain.

This at one bound altered the perspective of evolution.
Experience could now be handed down from generation
to generation; deliberate purpose could be substituted
for the blind sifting of selection ; change could be speeded
up ten-thousandfold. In man evolution could become
conscious. Admittedly it is far from conscious yet, but
the possibility is there, and it has at least been consciously
envisaged.

Seen in this perspective, human history represents but
the tiniest portion of the time man has before him ; it is
only the first ignorant and clumsy gropings of the new
type, born heir to so much biological history. The con-
stant setbacks, the lack of improvement in certain respects
for over two thousand years, are seen to be phenomena as
natural as the tumbles of a child learning to walk or the
deflection of a sensitive boy's attention by the need of
making a living.

297

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

The broad facts remain . Life had progressed even before
man was first evolved. Life progressed in giving rise to
man. Man has progressed during the half-million or so
years from the first Hominidae, even during the ten thou-
sand years since the final amelioration of climate after the
Ice Age. And the potentialities of progress which are
revealed, once his eyes have been opened to the evolu-
tionary vista, are unlimited.

At last we have an optimistic instead of a pessimistic
theory of this world and our life upon it. Admittedly the
optimism cannot be facile, and must be tempered with
reflection on the length of time involved, on the hard work
that will be necessary, on the inevitable residuum of accid-
ent and unhappiness that will remain. Perhaps we had
better call it a melioristic rather than an optimistic view;
but at least it preaches hope and inspires to action.

I believe very definitely that it is among human per-
sonalities that there exist the highest and most valuable
achievements of the universe — or at least the highest and
most valuable achievements of which we know or, appar-
ently, can have knowledge. That means that I believe
that the State exists for the development of individual lives,
not individuals for the development of the State.

But I also believe that the individual is not an isolated,
separate thing. An individual is a transformer of matter
and experience; it is a system of relations between its own
basis and the universe, including other individuals. An
individual may believe that he should devote himself en-
tirely to a cause, even sacrifice himself to it — his country,
truth, art, love. It is in the devotion of the sacrifice that
he becomes most himself; it is because of the devbtion or

298

LIFE CAN BE WORTH LIVING

sacrifice of individuals that causes become of value. But
of course the individual must in many ways subordinate
himself to the community — only not to the extent of
believing that in the community resides any virtue higher
than that of the individuals which compose it.

The community provides the machinery for the exist-
ence and development of individuals. There are those
who deny the importance of social machinery, who assert
that the only important thing is a change of heart, and
that the right machinery is merely a natural consequence
of the right inner attitude. This appears to me mere
solipsism. Different kinds of social machinery predispose
to different inner attitudes. The most admirable machin-
ery is useless if the inner life is unchanged; but social
machinery can affect the fulness and quality of life. Social
machinery can be devised to make war more difficult, to
promote health, to add interest to life. Let us not despise
machinery in our zeal for fulness of life, any more than we
should dream that machinery can ever, automatically grind
out perfection of living.

I believe in diversity. Every biologist knows that
human beings differ in their hereditary outfits, and there-
fore in the possibilities that they can realize. Psychology
shows how inevitably different are the types that jostle each
other on the world’s streets. No amount of persuasion or
education can make the extrovert really understand the
introvert, the verbalist understand the lover of handicraft,
the non-mathematical or non-musical person understand
the passion of the mathematician or the musician. We
can try to forbid certain attitudes of mind. We could
theoretically breed out much of human variety. But this
would be a sacrifice. Diversity is not only the salt of life

299

THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN

but the basis of collective achievement. And the comple-
ment of diversity is tolerance and understanding. This
does not mean rating all values alike. We must protect
society against criminals; we must struggle against what
we think wrong. But just as if we try to understand the
criminal we shall try to reform rather than merely to
punish, so we must try to understand why we judge others*
actions as wrong, which implies trying to understand the
workings of our own minds and discounting our own
prejudices.

Finally, I believe that we can never reduce our prin-
ciples to any few simple terms. Existence is always too
various and too complicated. We must supplement prin-
ciples with faith. And the only faith that is both concrete
and comprehensive is in life, its abundance and its pro-
gress. My final belief is in life.

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